Children are encouraged to develop a love for reading from a very early age. Each day, the whole school is involved in DEaR time (Drop Everything and Read) where children and adults spend time enjoying reading a book of their choice. 

Phonics

Pupils will develop their phonic knowledge through the teaching of phonics following the Essential Letters and Sounds Programme. This is a DfE approved programme, which will provide our children with a consistent and systematic programme for learning to read. 

Children take part in daily Phonics lessons in their classes and will be taught the skills to read effectively. We assess children’s reading skills every 6 weeks and provide extra sessions for children who require extra support. 

The books that children read in school and at home are matched to our Reading/ Phonics Programme, and therefore will be exactly linked to each child’s reading ability.

They will take two books home a week:

• A  fully decodable book  for your child to practise their learnt reading skills at home. It will have an owl sticker on it. This is the book that we would like you to support your child to read. It will contain written sounds and harder to read and spell words that your child has already learnt in school. Your child will have initially looked at it in school before taking it home. For this reason, this book will appear easier for your child to read than the levelled books we used to send home with children. They are expected to read this book up to 4 times to promote fluency and expression. Recent research shows that this is the best way to help children to learn to read. 

• A  shared reading book. This maybe a library book, a high-quality picture book or another reading book that is not fully decodable. This book will not be matched to your child’s reading level, so there is no expectations to attempt to read the words. This book is intended for your child to share with an adult or an older sibling, to enjoy the story and pictures without having to worry about applying their skills. 

Reception

Pupils will be taught letters and harder to read words following the Essential Letters and Sounds programme. They will also be taught to blend and segment simple words. 

Years 1 and 2

Pupils will build on their phonic knowledge from Reception class. They will start the year revising sounds taught at the end of the previous year and develop their phonic knowledge learning alternate pronunciations for letters. This will develop into learning spelling patterns in Year 2. They will also continue to develop their understanding of what they have read through guided and whole class reading sessions.

Years 3 to 6

For those children who need to continue to develop their phonic skills, lessons will take place in year 3. 

Pupils will develop the comprehension aspect of reading through Reading VIPERS. These are the key areas which we feel children need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts.

VIPERS stands for

Vocabulary

Inference

Prediction

Explanation

Retrieval

Sequence or Summarise

Pupils explore a variety of high-quality texts, often linked to their topic, through whole class reading sessions at least three times a week. 

For more information please contact the subject co-ordinator, Miss Cross, alternatively please look at your child's class page.