Reading
At Newby and Scalby Primary School, we believe that every pupil has the ability to learn to read and that they have a fundamental right to access high-quality literature from their very first day of school. In order to achieve this, we teach, develop and promote reading across the school in a number of different ways: Reading for Practice, Reading for Purpose and Reading for Pleasure. By doing this, we strive to ensure that our pupils leave our school, ready for the next phase of their education as fluent readers who have a love of reading.
Our school aims to:
- ensure that reading is prioritised;
- equip all pupils with the necessary phonic knowledge and skills to allow them to access texts, at an age-appropriate level;
- develop fluency at all stages so that our pupils learn to read text with proficient accuracy, automaticity and prosody;
- encourage pupils to foster a love and appreciation of books across the school and beyond;
- ensure that ALL children across the school have access to challenging, quality, age-appropriate texts;
- ensure that ALL children are being exposed to rich and varied vocabulary in order to address the word gap;
- provide a consistent approach in the teaching of reading comprehension;
- encourage our pupils to respond to their reading in numerous ways;
- provide a clear structure for teacher’s delivery of reading which ensures full curriculum coverage and a progression across all Key Stages.
Phonics and Early Reading
Phonics is taught in accordance with ELS (Essential Letters and Sounds). Our aim is to develop the children’s phonological awareness, ability to segment and blend words and to read harder to read and spell words by sight. For further detailed information of the progression, delivery and assessment of our phonics programme, please see our ‘Phonics and Early Reading Policy’.
The Reading Strategy - ‘Reading for Practice’
The Reading Strategy develops reading comprehension and reading for meaning skills and strategies. It takes place EVERY day. It incorporates age-appropriate, challenging texts, which are rich in vocabulary. These lessons mainly focus on our core Reading Strategy text but are supplemented by linked texts which will include poetry, non-fiction and other fiction texts to increase the breadth of genres and text-types that our pupils are exposed to. All pupils are included in this lesson and are exposed to high-quality texts and discussions. Reading fluency plays an integral part in our Reading Strategy lessons. Pupils will hear a fluent adult model of reading on a daily basis and be given the opportunity to read aloud each lesson using a range of fluency techniques. Oracy is a key driver in reading sessions and is used to support children in forming well-developed answers and opinions around reading through rich discussion about the text.
Reading opportunities across the curriculum - 'Reading for Purpose'
As well as their daily reading sessions, children will be given the opportunity to read and apply their comprehension skills and strategies that they have practised across the wider curriculum. This happens daily and allows pupils opportunities to gain essential knowledge from carefully selected, age-appropriate texts across the wider curriculum. This is carefully planned and sequenced as part of our REC (Reading Enhanced Curriculum).
Developing a reading culture - 'Reading for Pleasure'
At Newby and Scalby Primary School, we strive to instil a love of books and reading to all of our pupils so that they excel not only in school, but are equipped with a life-long love of reading.
We have many ongoing initiatives throughout the school including a timetabled daily story time for all classes and reading corners within each classroom that provide a range of high-quality, age-appropriate books for pupils to take home and either read for themselves, or for a parent to share with them. We also promote the ‘Top 30 Reads’ series from EYFS to Year Six including narrative, non-fiction and ‘There I Am’ books which reflect different cultures and realities.
