Reading at Rowlatts

Here at Rowlatts Mead Primary Academy, we believe that reading is one of the most vital skills our children need to access the curriculum whilst also being an extremely important life skill. We are aware that confident readers can access a wide range of life experiences and enjoy a breadth of genres. Reading allows individuals to acquire knowledge, find out what is going on, achieve and enjoy themselves. It is important that we support our children to become competent in the skill of reading, understanding what they have read and empowering them to love and appreciate reading for life.

To achieve this, we aim to keep reading fresh and interesting for our children by using a range of teaching strategies and initiatives through our everyday practice which creates an ethos that positively promotes reading.

Reading Tips – https://www.booktrust.org.uk/books-and-reading/tips-and-advice/reading-tips/

Reading for Pleasure – https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/reading-for-pleasure/

Phonics and RWI

For children who are beginning their reading journey, we focus on getting them to recognise letters, sounds and high frequency words. This is done through the ‘Read Write Inc. Phonics’ approach. This begins in EYFS where children are exposed to sessions of 60 minutes in duration by the Summer Term. This continues into Key Stage One until the Phonics programme is complete. As the child’s understanding of how letters, sounds and words becomes more competent, our focus changes to comprehension and knowing what has been read. Please see the links below to support your child in early reading:

Oxford Owl – Learn to Read with Phonics

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/learn-to-read-phonics/

Pure Sounds – YouTube (RWI)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6OiU2h3sUI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB6SvZscxgg

Oxford Owl – Free e-book library

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/free-ebooks/

DEAR Time/Whole Class Guided Reading

Embedded in each Year Groups timetable is DEAR Time (Drop Everything and Read) and/or Guided Reading. This may involve a carousel of reading activities (comprehension, inference, independent reading, phonics) whereby the adult leads an activity focusing on a specific skill. Whole Class Guided Reading, led by the adult, focuses on extending the children’s reading skills through carefully planed reading tasks that are linked to their age and reading stage.

Intervention

We appreciate that all children have a varied exposure, experience, and confidence in terms of their reading. Therefore, selected children are given additional intervention to enable them to close the gap. These include additional RWI and Phonics, BWRP, 1:1 or small group reading sessions and access to the Nessy Reading Programme.

Class Novels and Reading for Pleasure

At Rowlatts, we have adopted the novel approach. Class novels are used to engage children in reading and link closely to the various curriculum topics. Shorter stories are used in both EYFS and Key Stage One to hook our younger readers. In school we have books to suit all readers including an extensive range of high interest, low level texts. These allow all children to access reading material at a level which is suitable for them.

Year Group Libraries

Each Year Group has a number of texts that they will be exposed to as a minimum. These include core texts that are linked to the different Topics, EDI (Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion) texts, Everyone’s Welcome texts and a number that are used for Book Study – see below.

EYFS – coming soon.

Year 1 – coming soon.

Year 2 – coming soon.

Year 3 – coming soon.

Year 4 – coming soon.

Year 5 – coming soon.

Year 6 – coming soon.

Book Study

A book study is when teachers read a text to their children. This is usually pitched at a higher level than the individuals in the class currently read at. This is to promote more exciting, challenging texts to children and to develop their skills of inference and deduction. This is used as a vehicle to model good reading practice and to promote the love of reading amongst the children.

Playground Reading

Reading in the playground: a range of books are taken into the playground for our children to access. This gives the opportunity for children to read and/or share stories with one another.

Reading at Home

Understanding the importance of reading, we expect pupils to read daily. This may be independently, to a sibling or with parents or guardians. Children in the early years and those beginning their reading journey in other Year Groups are provided with decodable books that match their correct level. Other children are provided books on Accelerated Reader matched to their correct level. All children also have access to MyOn where they can access a range of different texts. The academy hosts Reading Cafes where parents are welcome to join.

Accelerated Reader – Renaissance Learning Login

MyOn – https://www.myon.co.uk/login/index.html?logoutReason=10