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Reading

"There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book"   Frank Sefafini
Intent

At St Andrew’s, the reading curriculum is intended to expose our children to a range of cultural experiences to develop their understanding and knowledge of the world around them. This broadens vocabulary, develops understanding of formal and informal situations, as well as strengthens their comprehension skills when reading. All reading skills and knowledge are structured in a yearly and termly sequence to ensure focused coverage, with retrieval points built in to ensure children progress in their learning and are ready for the following year group. 

What does our approach to Reading look like?

At St Andrew’s, we want all our children to become readers.

We do this by teaching and providing opportunities to develop the following:

Oracy

Word Reading

Guided Reading Lessons

Reading for Pleasure

Home Reading and Volunteers

We develop children’s spoken language through:

We teach decoding and fluency through:

We teach vocabulary and comprehension skills through:

We build stamina as well as a life-long love of reading through:

We teach fluency, comprehension and enjoyment through:

  • Deliberate Vocabulary Teaching
  • Opportunities for purposeful talk across the curriculum
  • Opportunities to perform/present
  • Word walls in every classroom containing key vocabulary across the curriculum
  • Using Spelling Shed to talk about new vocabulary
  • Talking abut books
  • Story Time
  • Talk fr Writing – using talk stories to recall new stories before writing

  • Read Write Inc. Phonics teaching from Reception to Year 2
  • Phonics home reading books for children to continue to practise new sounds.
  • “Pinny time” for refreshing and recapping previously taught sounds/ words
  • Re-reading books a minimum of 3 times a week
  • One-t-one reading sessions by volunteers and LSAs
  • Free Choice home reading books
  • Lexia for Y3-6 to develop reading and comprehension skills.

  • Well planned guided reading lessons
  • Using high quality while class texts
  • Providing a variety of authors and story matter to inspire and extend
  • DERIC questioning embedded across the whole school
  • Comprehension practise with pictures and videos
  • Modelling responses
  • Guided Reading fluency approaches include:
  • Echo reading
  • Text marking
  • Choral Reading
  • Paired reading
  • Jump In
  • Dialogue Practise
  • Teacher Reads
  • Short burst Reads

  • A diverse selectin of books to ensure our whole community are represented in texts
  • Linking your key texts to our Cornerstones projects
  • Community book swap library
  • While class story time
  • Purposeful reading environments
  • Independent reading opportunities
  • Weekly visits t our school library
  • External Book Fairs

  • Weekly home reading tracker
  • Reading raffles
  • Volunteer readers
  • Marvellous Me celebrations
  • Phonics and reading workshops to help parents
         
The Reading Highway

The reading highway is our way of making sure that all children leave St Andrews as successful and happy readers. It helps us to know where every child is within their reading journey and ensures that we continue to develop and nurture their reading skills.

 

Guided Reading

Across the year children are immersed in a variety of books to broaden and further their understanding. Here are a few of the books that are explored.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Glossary

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound in a word represented by single letters or groups of letters.

For example cat (3 phonemes) c-a-t, fright (4 phonemes) f-r-igh-t

Grapheme

How the sound is written.

Blending

To read a word by saying the individual sounds then joining (blending) those sounds together to form the whole word for reading.

Segmenting

To write or spell a word by listening to the sounds in the word and choosing the graphemes (letters) to represent each sound.

Special Friends

(Digraph/Trigraph)

Special friends are a combination of two or three letters representing one sound, e.g. ck, ay, igh, oa.

Echo reading

This is when the teacher will read a small section of a book one sentence at a time. After a sentence has been read the children repeat it back with the same intonation and expression as the teacher.

Text marking

All the children are given a short snippet of the book and mark punctuation and speech so they can practise how they will use expression and pauses when they read it aloud. Then they read the snippet to their partner using their chosen expression.

Choral Reading

The whole class read a short section of the story altogether. They work as one to keep in time and match the expression and timings of the teacher.

Jump In

The teacher read a small section of the story. At the end of a sentence of a phrase the teacher will pause and the children need to “jump in” with the next word. This is great way of practising new vocabulary.