Implementation- How do we teach Reading and Phonics at Repton Primary School?
At Repton Primary we have a wide range of approaches to teaching reading. We want all our children to be fluent readers who leave us with a high level of reading and comprehension skills. However, we also want to foster a love and enjoyment of reading and to encourage children to experience texts form a wide range of genres and authors.
Children are heard read as often as possible and reading sessions are completed everyday. Comprehending a text is integral to the enjoyment of reading it – if you don’t understand what the text is about then it just becomes words on a page! Comprehension skills are taught in our curriculum as specific lessons and also through whole class reading sessions.
We encourage the children to read as often as possible, including at home. Every teacher reads aloud a class story book, which the children thoroughly enjoy hearing and sharing.
Phonics
We follow Monster Phonics as our systematic synthetic phonics scheme across EYFS and Key stage 1. All children have a daily phonics session in a differentiated group to teach and embed skills in spelling and reading. Games and resources from Phonics Play are used to support the phonic teaching. Children are given a weekly spelling pattern/ patterns to learn at home to develop their understanding. Towards the end of Year One, the children complete the national phonics screening and an information session for parents is held in school about this.
School Reading Scheme.
We use a range of levelled banded readers to ensure progression in reading. These include Oxford Reading Tree, Sunshine, Storyworld, Ginn and many more. Using a range of schemes ensures children are exposed to a wide range of different texts, vocabulary and genre. Children progress through these schemes as they move through the school and we expect them to read these at home as well as in school. In Key Stage 1 children are listened to on an individual basis. Children will be regularly assessed and will progress through the bands when staff assess them to be ready. This will involve developing the skills of word recognition, phonic application, inference, comprehension and expression. When the children have progressed beyond the banded books, they become free readers and select their reading books from the library.
Whole Class Reading.
As part of their English curriculum, all classes develop their reading through class texts, which support both their reading and writing development. These texts are read aloud by the teacher, to model intonation and expression, but also by the children too. The children also complete activities based on many chapters from the book. During these sessions, targeted questions are asked which cover a range of comprehension skills. . We use eight strategies to help the children understand the texts that they read. We have displays in every classroom showing the eight strategies 'The Secret Life of a Comprehender' This enables us to make regular assessments of reading progress alongside listening to the children read their reading books. We foster a love of reading through our weekly class story sessions.
Library Books
The school has recently invested in the provision of well stocked fiction and non-fiction libraries which are regularly updated. Key Stage One classes also have a variety of books targeted at the specific age of the children in the class.
Reading Intervention
Sometimes, for whatever reason, children may need a bit of extra support with their reading. We provide this support in a variety of ways e.g. extra reading sessions, dyslexia friendly ICT programmes and focussed reading comprehension work. Our Teaching Assistants deliver an effective intervention which teaches the skills of comprehension called 'The Secret Life of a Comprehender'.
Please click on the attached document to find out about the eight reading strategies.