Early Reading Aims
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Provide a range of reading for pleasure opportunities so that children develop a love of reading.
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Provide a rigorous and structured phonics programme to ensure that children can decode age appropriate books, with access to books that will support their early reading and beyond.
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Develop the children’s oral and written comprehension skills, with skilled questioning and opportunities for discussion at the heart of this.
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Expose children to rich and varied vocabulary though real and engaging texts.
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Provide reading as models for the children’s own writing and make the link between reading and writing explicit to the children.
At Newbrough C of E Primary, we believe reading to be the foundation of our English curriculum. We aim to provide a range of reading for pleasure opportunities to ensure children achieve a life-long love of reading which is developed from our Early Years through to Year Six and beyond. The simple view of reading, developed by Gough and Tumner in the 1980s, identifies two key areas of proficiency which need to be mastered before children become successful readers: decoding and language comprehension. We are passionate about this theory, teaching reading through school to all ages, ensuring that children are not only able to decode the text, but also understands the text and are able to make inferences confidently. Therefore, our curriculum has been specifically designed to expose children to high quality, vocabulary-rich texts which not only support reading development but create an explicit link between reading and writing. Our diversified, ever-evolving curriculum is made up of a range of reading models and extracts to inspire children as readers, writers, and people. Our aim is for children to explore the impact of the themes and written words from a range of genres, discussing what they have read and extending their reading further through further texts or research.
Early years is a language rich environment and it is here that a life-long love of reading begins to be developed. Language comprehension and word reading are supported through high quality talk, sharing books, singing songs and sharing rhymes and poems together. A core spine of high-quality texts support reading development and enjoyment. A range of genres and authors are explored across the curriculum. Alongside this, phonics is taught in short daily sessions using our phonics scheme, Little Wandle. Formative and summative assessment ensure that teaching meets the needs of all pupils.
In Year 1, the children focus on Phase 5 of Little Wandle, where all of the alternative sounds and pronunciations for different graphemes are introduced. They will also further their skills in blending to read more complicated sounds and have to choose the correct phoneme. Year 2 children complete Key Skills every day, where they focus on reading, inference, spelling rules and applying these in their writing. They use Spelling Frame to practise these spelling rules every Tuesday morning and this is available to access at home too!
We use Big Cat reading books, which are designed to be used alongside Little Wandle to ensure that each child builds fluency in their reading. We aim for the children to be able to read around 90% of the words independently before moving onto the next stage. This gives the children a great sense of achievement in their reading ability and develops their confidence to move on to trickier texts.
All children also have weekly library sessions to explore a range of genres and to choose a book to take home.
Attached are some useful documents to help you to support your child's learning at home.
How can you support your child’s reading at home?
- Encourage your child to ‘pretend’ to read a book before they can read words. This lets them decide that is happening in the story and repeat key words used when you read aloud you your children. It also gives children a ‘love of books’ from an early age.
- Read with your child as much as you can, even if it is a page a night. Read aloud to your child as well as listening to them read. Both are as equally as important for your child’s development.
- Read a wide variety of books with your child. Don’t worry if your child wants to read the same book over again, this is also excellent to develop their confidence in reading.
- Don’t worry if they make mistakes, just continue to support them.
- Ask questions when reading books to develop children’s understanding of the text.
- Visit the library with your child if possible.
