Reading

In Nursery, activities are designed to enable pupils to hear and join-in with spoken language in order to enhance the development of their oral language. Children are introduced to new vocabulary to help them better understand the world around them. In addition to this, opportunities are created that allow children to listen to, identify and join-in with rhymes, songs and stories with familiar patterns. Texts in the Nursery Reading Canon have been purposefully chosen to support the development of these skills.

In Reception and KS1, children practise reading the words on the page by reading texts that are fully aligned to our Sounds-Write phonics programme. This ensures they are practising previously taught phonic knowledge. In order for children to develop their code knowledge more fluently, they will practise reading from the same decodable home-reader for several days until they are completely fluent. As children move through KS1 and their phonic knowledge increases, they themselves begin to read aloud selected texts with support where it is needed. As well as their home-reader, children will also take home a text to share with a family member. Once children have sufficient code knowledge, they select their own home-reader; initially, this is supported by an adult and is usually from around Year 3.

Across the school, children listen to texts being read to them from our Reading Canon. These texts have been carefully chosen to ensure our pupils experience a range of texts that develop their vocabulary and background knowledge.

Whole class reading lessons aim to develop reading fluency and aid comprehension. To achieve this, reading aloud is a key part of our reading lessons and all children read aloud in a variety of ways. Children also read and follow the text as secondary readers while the primary reader is reading aloud. This is to maximise the amount of reading done by every child in every lesson. In addition to this, there are regular opportunities for ‘close reading’ where children are expected to answer questions and write specific sentences about the passage of text they have just read independently, before having a class discussion. We set high expectations in our lessons, which is reflected in the texts we have purposefully selected for our Reading Canon. We also read in other curriculum areas to further develop the children’s vocabulary and background knowledge.

At St. Andrew’s we use specific reading techniques are used to ensure children’s engagement in lessons. These include paired reading, repeated reading and carefully reading and discussing specific sections of text. As well as whole class reading aloud, teachers also carefully select vocabulary from the text to teach, and children are given opportunities to pronounce the word and use it orally. We give child-friendly definitions and do not promote guessing definitions.

Our reading lessons use high-quality literature to develop children’s reading fluency, as well as increase their vocabulary and background knowledge.