Reading at Delabole Primary School:

                                                                                                                                      Mason Cooley

Reading lies at the heart of learning at Delabole Primary School. We believe that becoming a confident and fluent reader gives every child access to the wider curriculum, opens up new worlds and ideas, and brings a lifetime of enjoyment.

From their earliest days with us, children are surrounded by stories, ambitious vocabulary and carefully chosen, high-quality texts. We teach children the knowledge and skills they need to become successful readers while nurturing curiosity, imagination and a genuine enthusiasm for books.

Aims:

We aim to nurture a love of books and encourage and enable children to become readers for life. In order to facilitate this, we aim to provide children with the effective reading strategies which are vital in enabling them to become fluent, responsive readers. We aim to encourage each child to become a confident, independent reader who is self-motivated to read both for pleasure and to fulfil a given purpose.

Read Write Inc. Phonics:

At Delabole Primary School, Read Write Inc. Phonics is our systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP), providing children with a clear and consistent approach to the early stages of learning to read.

Children in EYFS and Key Stage 1 are taught phonics every day. Through Read Write Inc., children learn to recognise sounds, blend them confidently to read words and develop the accuracy and automaticity needed for fluent reading.

The books children read are carefully matched to the sounds they have been taught. This allows them to practise their developing knowledge successfully, experience success and build confidence.

Children are assessed regularly and grouped carefully so that phonics teaching is closely matched to what they need to learn next. Where a child needs further support, we provide additional, targeted teaching promptly, helping them to keep up rather than catch up.

As children become secure in their phonics knowledge and increasingly fluent readers, the emphasis begins to shift from learning to read to reading to learn, while vocabulary, comprehension and fluency continue to be explicitly developed.

We know that parents and carers are an important part of children's reading development. Throughout the year, we provide opportunities for families to understand how we teach phonics and reading and how they can support their child effectively at home.

In Year 1, children complete the statutory Phonics Screening Check during the summer term.

Daily Reading; From Phonics to Fluent, Thoughtful Readers

Once children have secured the phonics knowledge needed to read accurately, they progress into our whole-class approach to reading. From this point onwards, through to Year 6, children have a daily reading lesson.

Across a typical five-lesson sequence, children experience three complementary approaches to reading:

Fluency:

Fluency is the bridge between being able to decode a text and being able to understand it. During fluency lessons, children predominantly work with their class novel. Key vocabulary is explicitly taught before reading, reducing barriers to understanding and allowing children to concentrate on reading the text accurately, confidently and expressively.

Teachers provide clear models of fluent reading and children have repeated opportunities to practise and rehearse passages.

Through this approach, we explicitly develop:

• accuracy and automatic word recognition;
• appropriate pace and phrasing;
• prosody, including expression, stress and rhythm;
• intonation and responsiveness to punctuation;
• confidence when reading increasingly challenging texts aloud.

Our approach is informed by the work of Christopher Such. Rather than simply asking children to “read with expression”, teachers break fluency down and teach it explicitly and deliberately.

Extended Reading:

Extended reading allows children to spend sustained time actually reading.

Children read longer, uninterrupted sections of the same text, moving beyond the rehearsal of a short passage and learning to maintain successful reading over a greater length of time. In doing so, they build the concentration, stamina and independence needed to become accomplished readers.

Discussion remains purposeful. Children talk about what they have read, make connections and clarify their understanding without discussion replacing valuable reading time.

As a guide, we aim for approximately 70% of the lesson to be spent reading and 30% discussing the text, ensuring children experience substantial amounts of meaningful reading within lessons.

Close Reading:

Close reading teaches children that sometimes a text deserves to be read slowly, carefully and more than once.

Teachers select purposeful sections of text and guide children to pay close attention to important vocabulary, language choices, meaning and evidence.

Through carefully structured questioning, re-reading and discussion, children learn to:

• retrieve and locate relevant information;
• explore vocabulary within context;
• make and justify inferences;
• consider the choices an author has made;
• make connections within and across texts;
• explain and justify their thinking using evidence from the text.

Close reading enables children to move beyond simply knowing what a text says. They begin to consider how meaning has been created, what the author wants them to understand and what evidence supports their thinking.

Together, fluency, extended reading and close reading provide a balanced approach across the week.