Our aim is to nurture enthusiastic, confident and capable readers who are able to understand and engage with a broad range of texts. We want children to develop a genuine love of reading and to read for pleasure, interest and information across all areas of the curriculum.

What are children learning?

Children should:

• Experience exciting and enthralling books as soon as they enter our school.
• Know how well they are achieving in reading and be supported towards their targets.
• Experience text through interactive challenging activities, including the experience of theatre.
• Be challenged to develop their reading potential and aim high in the complexity of the text and stamina of their reading.
• Read in a stimulating, happy and secure environment.
• Access high quality reading resources in classrooms, libraries and using ICT.
• Experience a variety of creative teaching methods and approaches to develop their comprehension of text.
• Be supported by a proactive reading partnership of home, school and parish. 

 

How are children learning?

Foundation Stage:

Reading is embedded into the daily routine, with children provided with regular opportunities to develop their reading skills and engage with a wide variety of texts. A range of approaches and experiences are used to make reading meaningful, enjoyable and accessible to all pupils. Children learn within stimulating, print-rich environments where written language is visible and naturally incorporated into their everyday learning.

Each week, children in Nursery and Reception take part in ‘Magic Storybox’ sessions, which provide an engaging starting point for their writing activities and form the basis of much of the continuous provision throughout the week. These sessions provide opportunities for children to explore stories, develop vocabulary and use their ideas across different areas of learning.

There are also dedicated times during the day when groups of children share and explore books in a more structured way, including guided reading sessions. Class teachers regularly share big books with the whole class and ensure that stories, rhymes and other texts are read aloud each day, helping to foster a love of books and develop children’s listening and comprehension skills.

Every classroom has a welcoming and attractive reading area, providing comfortable seating and access to a carefully selected range of high-quality, engaging and age-appropriate books. These spaces encourage children to explore books independently and develop positive attitudes towards reading.

Phonics

The school has clear expectations of pupils’ phonics term-by–term, from Nursery to Year 2. (Please see Phonics Long term)

In nursery, children learn to discriminate between sounds in the environment through the use of rhyme, rhythm and alliteration. The foundation stage is a ‘language-rich’ environment that focusses on developing children's speaking and listening skills to lay the foundations of phonics. The emphasis is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills. Children will take home wordless picture books to talk about the story and to develop skills such as prediction, inference and justification.

From Reception onwards, children are taught phonics using ‘Phonics Bug’, an accredited DFE systematic synthetic phonics scheme. The children are taught to build up words using their phonic knowledge of known graphemes, digraphs and trigraphs. Children will take home a reading book which contains known sounds. 

Reading at home every day will have the greatest impact on your child’s learning and development. We expect children to read at least 3 times a week.

Key Stage One:

Children are given a reading book at an appropriate level to take home, together with a reading diary.  Children’s individual reading will be monitored by staff and supported by classroom assistants. It is expected that children read at home with an adult at least three times a week. Reading for pleasure is strongly encouraged. Pupils will take home a library book on a weekly basis to share with parents at home.

Through the use of ‘Phonics Bug’, phonics sessions take place five times a week. During shared and guided reading, phonics work is reinforced in the context of real texts. The English National Curriculum provides a wide range of text types. Writing activities follow on from shared reading with a balance of reading and writing. Each year group has a set of ‘Love to Read Books’ which are age group appropriate and cover a wide range of themes to be enjoyed by the class during reading time.

Each classroom has an attractive reading area with comfortable seating and a quality selection of engaging and appropriate books available.

Children in Year 1 continue to take home a fully phonetically decodable book to practise and embed their reading skills. Children in Year Two will have the opportunity to move to coloured level books once they have become more fluent in their reading skills.

Key Stage Two:

Children use the Pearson coloured level books, to assist in the improvement of pupils’ reading abilities and their comprehension of what they read. Members of the Senior Leadership team and class teachers closely monitor the achievement of pupils in reading and ensure that the children are reading at an appropriate level. Where appropriate, children read to and are heard by an adult in school.  It is expected that parents also hear their children read at least three times a week and sign in their planners.

Pupils who need to develop their phonetic awareness will receive a phonics session three times a week and be in a group according to the phase that they require.

Children at St Wilfrid’s are exposed to high quality literature in every year group. Each class has access to ‘Love to Read Books’, which are age-appropriate texts which cover a wide range of genres. These are shared on a daily basis and changed frequently. Each classroom has an attractive reading area with comfortable seating and a quality selection of engaging and appropriate books available in order to develop children’s reading for pleasure and promote positive attitudes towards reading.

Guided Reading

The purpose of a Guided Reading session is to deepen children’s inferential, retrieval and decoding skills. Following on from ‘Phonics Bug’, the children in Key Stage Two are exposed to high quality text using ‘Phonic Bug Comprehension’.

Bug Club Comprehension provides 30 weeks of teaching for each year group, with ten weeks of teaching per term. Each week of teaching is anchored by a key text. Texts are varied in genre and style, and some are studied for one week while others are studied over a period of up to five weeks. Guided reading takes place outside the standard English lesson. 

 

How we assess the progress children make

At St Wilfrid’s, we carefully monitor pupils’ reading progress to ensure that they are accessing texts that are appropriately matched to their reading ability.

Pupils read regularly with an adult, allowing teachers to assess their fluency, accuracy and comprehension on an ongoing basis. As pupils develop confidence and demonstrate greater fluency and understanding, they progress through the Bug Club and Colour Banded reading levels.

To further monitor reading fluency, pupils complete a words-per-minute assessment in September and at the end of each half-term. In addition, pupils undertake regular summative assessments to ensure that their comprehension skills are developing in line with their reading fluency.

Where a pupil is not making the expected progress in reading fluency or comprehension, additional support is put in place. These pupils are heard reading more frequently in school, daily where possible, and their progress is monitored and tracked closely to ensure that they receive the support they need to become confident, fluent readers.