Images protected by Greenhouse School Websites
Quick Links

 

 

Quick Links Open/Close

Back to top

Earlham Primary School

Reading

At Earlham, our aim is for all children to learn to read fluently and with confidence, regardless of their background, needs or ability. We strive to foster a love of reading at school and at home and believe reading is an entitlement that should enable children to connect with the wider world and provide them with a fundamental life skill. Therefore, reading is at the very heart of our curriculum. We are committed to promoting a love for reading and not only giving children opportunities to read in English and Reading lessons, but in the wider curriculum too.

The curriculum is delivered through Little Wandle phonics, (a systematic and synthetic phonics programme), a linked approach to shared and guided reading using the Destination Reader pedagogy, regular opportunities for independent reading and hearing quality texts read aloud every day. We start teaching phonics in Nursery/Reception which ensures pupils build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through the school.

We make use of high-quality texts in both reading lessons and across the curriculum to provide challenging reading opportunities outside of the reading lessons. To enable all our pupils to see themselves in the books they read, we ensure our books in school reflect the diversity of our community and the wider world. All of these are essential components needed to develop fluent, enthusiastic and critical readers. 

It is important that children are motivated to read at home regularly; when their reading opportunities increase, so does their fluency and stamina which in turn increases their enjoyment of reading. Therefore, the link between children’s motivation to read and reading for pleasure is reciprocal. Furthermore, we know that reading for pleasure is beneficial not only for reading outcomes, but for wider learning enjoyment and mental wellbeing. We understand the significance of parents and carers in supporting their children to develop both word reading and comprehension skills so we endeavour to build a home-school partnership which enables parents and carers to have the confidence to support their children with reading at home.

 

Implementation

Phonics and Early Reading

 Foundations for phonics in Nursery

  • We provide a balance of child-led and adult-led experiences for all children that meet the curriculum expectations for ‘Communication and language’ and ‘Literacy’. These include:

- sharing high-quality stories and poems

- learning a range of nursery rhymes and action rhymes

- activities that develop focused listening and attention, including oral blending

- attention to high-quality language.

  • We ensure Nursery children are well prepared to begin learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and blending in Reception.

 

Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1

  • We teach phonics for 30 minutes a day. In Reception, we build from 10-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to the full-length lesson as quickly as possible. Each Friday, we review the week’s teaching to help children become fluent readers. 
  • Children make a strong start in Reception: teaching begins in Week 2 of the Autumn term.
  • We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised expectations of progress.
  • Children in Reception are taught to read and spell words using Phase 2 and 3 GPCs, and words with adjacent consonants (Phase 4) with fluency and accuracy.
  • Children in Year 1 review Phase 3 and 4 and are taught to read and spell words using Phase 5 GPCs with fluency and accuracy.

 

Daily Keep-up lessons ensure every child learns to read

  • Any child who needs additional practice has daily Keep-up support, taught by a fully trained adult. Keep-up lessons match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures, resources and mantras, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every child secures their learning.
  • We timetable daily phonics lessons for any child in Year 2 or 3 who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the Phonics Screening Check. These children urgently need to catch up, so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen. We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach to these using the Keep-up resources.
  • If any child in Year 3 to 6 has gaps in their phonic knowledge when reading or writing, we plan phonics ‘catch-up’ lessons to address specific reading/writing gaps. These short, sharp lessons last 10 minutes and take place at least three times a week.

Home reading

  • The decodable reading practice book is taken home to ensure success is shared with the family.
  • Reading for pleasure books also go home for parents to share and read to children.
  • We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised parents’ resources to engage our families and share information about phonics, the benefits of sharing books, how children learn to blend and other aspects of our provision, both online and through workshops.

Ensuring consistency and pace of progress

  • Every teacher in our school has been trained to teach reading, so we have the same expectations of progress. We all use the same language, routines and resources to teach children to read so that we lower children’s cognitive load.
  • Weekly content grids map each element of new learning to each day, week and term for the duration of the programme.
  • Lesson templates, Prompt Cards and ‘How to’ videos ensure teachers all have a consistent approach and structure for each lesson.
  • The Reading Leader and SLT use the Audit and Prompt cards to regularly monitor and observe teaching; they use the summative data to identify children who need additional support and gaps in learning.
  • Keep-up grids are used following assessments to highlight the progress of the classes. 
  • Where classes are achieving below 70% security at the phase they have been taught, Assess and Review Plans are created so that gaps are filled as a class. 

 

KS2 Whole Class Reading – Destination Reader

Why we use Destination Reader

  • To foster a life-long love of reading.
  • To develop a consistent approach to the teaching of reading across KS2.
  • To read for purpose across the curriculum
  • To have a consistent approach to developing vocabulary
  • To provide a curriculum in line with the requirements of the revised National Curriculum
  • To provide an assessment approach, centred on formative assessment.

 

Key Principles

  • Enable quality experience
  • Promote enjoyment
  • Increase reading mileage
  • Build firm foundations
  • Develop thinking and understanding
  • Make talk central

 

‘Destination Reader’, as a pedagogy, has been embedded in all KS2 classes with consistency between all year groups. Children read aloud to each other and to the teacher which supports them to understand the meaning of new words they meet as well as correct themselves and each other when they are reading.

Modelling of text discussion is an important feature of the pedagogy. Children work in pairs to discuss the text through applying the strategies from the National Curriculum. This provides children with the opportunity to agree, challenge and build on each others’ ideas using systematic use of a series of language stems. 

Discussion of texts is a key focus for Earlham and is embedded and replicated in other curricular areas like Geography and History reading where reading material is emulated. Importance is placed on listening to and discussing a wide range of fiction, poetry, non-fiction and reading books that are structured in different ways and reading for a range of purposes, including diversity and those featuring other minority areas such as disability.

 

In KS2, DR lessons will focus on either a different fiction, non-fiction or poetry text every half-term.

Destination Reader lessons focus on explicitly teaching one of these seven DR stems:

  • Predicting - Using background knowledge, the text or context.
  • Asking Questions - Asking (not just answering) open questions to deepen understanding.
  • Clarifying - Recognising when words, phrases or the text is not understood and using a toolkit to help.
  • Summarising - Identifying key information or ideas, digesting and reducing .
  • Inferring - Being a detective and using clues which often relates to characters, settings or mood.
  • Making Connections - Using personal experience and knowledge of other texts/the world.
  • Evaluating - Thinking about the author’s technique, use of features, language, spelling, punctuation and grammar.

 

Reading for Pleasure 

We highly value reading for pleasure and work hard as a school to grow our Reading for Pleasure pedagogy.  We read to children every day to promote the love of reading. We choose these books carefully as we want children to experience a wide range of books, including books that reflect the children at Earlham as well as books that open windows into other worlds and cultures.  Every classroom has access to a range of books including fiction, non-fiction and poetry and these books encourage a love for reading. We curate these books and talk about them to entice children to read a wide range of books.  In Nursery and Reception, children have access to the reading corner every day in their free flow time and the books are continually refreshed.   Reception and KS1 children take home a ‘Reading for Pleasure’ book weekly whilst KS2 take home a book of their choosing which is changed as it finished.   Children log these in their class ‘Reading for Pleasure’ record books. 

 Children across the school have regular opportunities to engage with a wide range of Reading for Pleasure events (book fairs, author visits, workshops and events such as World Book Day).

 

Impact

Assessment

Assessment is used to monitor progress and to identify any child needing additional support as soon as they need it.

  • Assessment for learning is used:
    • daily within class to identify children needing Keep-up support
    • weekly in the Review lesson to assess gaps, address these immediately and secure fluency of GPCs, words and spellings.

 

  • Summative assessment is used:
    • every three weeks as part of the Little Wandle programme to assess progress, to identify gaps in learning that need to be addressed, to identify any children needing additional support and to plan the Keep-up support that they need.
    • by SLT and scrutinised through the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessment tracker, to narrow attainment gaps between different groups of children and so that any additional support for teachers can be put into place.

 Statutory assessment

  • Children in Year 1 sit the Phonics Screening Check. Any child not passing the check re-sits it in Year 2. 

Ongoing formative assessment is conducted throughout lessons and is further informed by their Big Picture lessons.  Teacher judgements are uploaded to Sonar half termly.  This is then used to inform planning and support discussions at pupil progress meetings where allocation of further support or intervention is identified; this ensures that all children continue to make good progress from their starting points.

 

‘Reading’ Websites and Blogs
We have included below some ‘reading’ websites and blogs that you might find helpful and interesting.