Reading at Old Sarum Primary
Reading.
Vision
We aim to inspire pupils to become lifelong readers with a love of reading.
We want to help them develop their own reading preferences and read widely across a variety of genres and including a variety of authors, whilst encouraging them to be fluent and confident readers.
At Old Sarum, we teach all children to read and spell so they can become fluent readers building on their knowledge of phonemes and their corresponding spelling. We want to equip all our pupils with a secure phonic knowledge that enables them to read and write successfully. We support children to develop decoding, fluency and comprehension skills with access to a wide range of authors and genres, these with increasing challenge as they progress through the school. These skills are modelled by a teacher and applied by children through the delivery of daily reading lessons.
How is it taught and why?
Our phonics programme Sounds Write is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) Sounds-Write draws on well-established theories of learning and teaching, Sounds Write is a highly structured, multi-sensory approach to teaching children and is a linguistic phonics programme that teaches children 175 sound-spelling correspondences over YR to Y2 and beyond. Through the programme, children are taught four key concepts:
- Letters are symbols that represent sounds
- Sounds can be spelled using 1, 2, 3 or 4 letters
- The same sound can be spelled in different ways
- The same spelling can represent different sounds
Every day, children are taught the 3 skills required to learn to read and spell..
- Blending – the ability to push sounds together to make a word
- Segmenting – the ability to pull apart the individual sounds in words
- Phoneme manipulation – the ability to insert sounds into and delete sounds out of words
Guided Reading
Reading is taught daily using a whole class approach so all children experience a range of texts incorporating fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
Teachers model reading aloud to develop understanding and prosody.
Children read aloud to develop fluency and flair and connect with the text.
Reading skills are explicitly taught using a VIPERS approach. A weekly focus on a different skill ensures children are able to analyse and meaningfully reflect on an author’s intention. In KS2, explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies are modelled by the teacher and children are given the opportunity to independently apply these skills.
- Vocabulary (and grammar – linguistic knowledge)
- Inference
- Prediction
- Explanation
- Retrieval
- Summarising (KS1) / Sequencing (KS2)
Our aim is that children will
- Have decoding skills that are secure and hence vocabulary is developing;
- Be independent, fluent and enthusiastic readers who read widely and frequently;
- Be developing their understanding and enjoyment of stories, poetry, plays and non-fiction, and learning to read silently;
- Be developing their knowledge and skills in reading non-fiction about a wide range of subjects;
- Take place in discussions about a text and to be able to justify their views independently about what they have read;
- Make comparisons across different genres and begin to identify the author’s intentions when using specific words or phrases.
- To perform texts/poems with confidence and with an awareness of audience.
- Read sufficiently fluently and effortlessly, with understanding at an age appropriate interest level in readiness for secondary school
In addition we expect our children to:
- Have a love of reading that feeds the imagination;
- Read widely across both fiction and non-fiction, developing knowledge of themselves and the world in which they live;
- Have developed their own preferences for reading, using this to recommend books to others, giving reasons for their choices.
- Have a developed vocabulary beyond that used in everyday speech;
- Understand nuances in vocabulary choice;
- Understand age-appropriate, academic vocabulary.