Reading with Children
We aim to develop a love of reading for all our children and their families.
We hold events for parents and carers to find out more about how they can help their children with phonics and reading for enjoyment at home.
Our children use their book bags to take books home each day.
Suggestions for books for children to read at home:
Nursery and Reception
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6
Click here for Dyslexia Information.
Reading Together
Being able to read well enables our children to discover new facts and access the broad, balanced and rich curriculum we offer. It also opens them up to a world of new ideas, stories and opportunities. Our staff are committed to ensuring that children become independent and fluent readers during their time at our school.
Our children’s love of reading is fostered through access to a wide range of stories, poems and non-fiction books, and carefully selected whole class readers. Books are used in all areas of the curriculum to help teach specific projects, as well as broadening children’s social, moral, spiritual and cultural awareness.
We truly believe that by inspiring children to read, by reading to them daily in class, and by giving children opportunities to explore a range of rich and appropriately challenging texts through a variety of reading activities they will, in turn, succeed.
Our structured approach to reading is carefully designed to ensure the best results for our children. We use the Letters and Sounds scheme of work to teach phonics across EYFS and KS1. This learning is reinforced through enhancement tasks, songs and fun, and practical activities related to the corresponding letter formation. Children begin their ‘book-reading journey’ with non-worded books, which encourage storytelling, discussion and develop questioning and prediction skills. Children are continuously assessed and, as their segmenting and blending progresses, they are given activities and books to match their learning. These include picture/word matching cards, CVC word books, caption/picture matching cards and the early reading books from our school scheme.
Children could not make the progress they do without support from home and so we work closely with parents to help them understand how to pronounce the phonics correctly and have strategies to develop their child’s reading skills. As well as our own home readers, we use the Reading Bug Club online program to develop confident and motivated readers. It combines hundreds of finely levelled books with interactive eBooks and an online reading world.
As the children's reading progresses, we work on developing a pupil’s vocabulary and comprehension skills through structured whole class reading sessions. Activities are carefully planned to ensure that reading stamina also develops as children progress through the school.
In addition to this our class reads ensure that all our pupils are exposed to high quality challenging texts. This allows for an immersion in more sophisticated vocabulary and therefore helps them to build their own vocabulary that will be wider, challenging and more specific.
We work hard to ensure this joy of reading extends beyond the classroom and support, promote and value the contributions that parents and carers make to their child’s reading at home. We give weekly reading awards in each year group, not only to encourage our pupils to read a wide range of literature, but also to share and discuss these books at home.