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Leedon Lower School

'Learning Without Limits'

Reading

Reading and Phonics

Intent

At Leedon Lower School, we value reading as a key life skill and are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers who enjoy and understand the value of reading, allowing them to use this skill to open doors in their futures. We believe reading is key to academic success across the wide and varied curriculum offered at Leedon and thus ensure we have a holistic approach to reading is delivered throughout.

Implementation

Children across the school take part in daily reading for pleasure sessions. In key stage one, discreet phonic sessions are delivered where pupils are taught a range of transferable reading skills and are exposed to a range of different age-appropriate reading texts.
In KS2, discreet Reading Skills sessions are taught to focus directly on the reading skills of vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Recall and Summarising.

The newly refurbished and well stocked library is accessible to all, from Little Learners Preschool right through to Year 4, whether to borrow books to enjoy at home, relax and read at school or as reference points to extend and develop learning and knowledge during lessons.
Each class has a timetabled library session where they can choose and change their books.
Every classroom has its own reading library where children can choose from a range of text types including fiction and non-fiction books, magazines, newspapers and journals to enjoy in school or to borrow to read at home.
All year groups display a bank of high-quality topic texts, both fiction and non-fiction, for children to access during group and independent learning, and during reading for pleasure sessions. These books have been carefully selected by staff to support enquiry and deepening of subject knowledge and the range of texts have been selected so they are accessible to all.
Success and progress in reading is highly celebrated at Leedon Lower School.
Reading competitions take place throughout the year to engage and support development of a love for reading.

Whole class reads are enjoyed and celebrated with children. High quality, enjoyable texts are read to the children at points throughout the day to encourage a love of listening and immersion in stories and story-telling.
Each class celebrates the progress and hard work shown in reading on a weekly basis on their Reading Success board. On this board, hard work as well as progress is recognised.
Children will work through our school reading scheme. These Further Reader books are leveled books which match the children’s current reading stage. Children will be moved on to the next level when they are deemed ready by their class teacher.
Children will be heard to read regularly by an adult in school
Provisions will be implemented as deemed suitable to aid the more rapid progress of pupils who would benefit from extra support. These provisions may include phonics interventions, Reading Gladiators and daily readers.

The Reading Gladiators programme is used specifically for children identified as working at greater depth. This intervention invites the children to deepen their understanding and to explore further their ability to enquiry and dissect the features of a range of texts and text types.
We have provided each child with a home reading record where we expect children to read their reading book at home with their family - comments are then made to be seen by their class teacher. Children are incentivised to read regularly at home, receiving ‘Leedon Blues’, our whole school reward system, when they read four times a week.
Each child is provided with an account and log in details for Giglets across the school, a reading and comprehension site that allows teachers to allocate high quality texts in line with the child’s reading level. This site is particularly designed to be of benefit to children with EAL and dyslexia.
Regular assessment takes place and is recorded on Sonar against National Curriculum Objectives to monitor progress and identify areas of need that may arise. This allows areas of need to be planned for and addressed to support the ongoing learning and progression of the child.

By the time our children leave Leedon Lower School, our vision is that they are competent readers who can recommend books to their peers, have a thirst for reading a range of genres and text types and participate in discussions about books, including evaluating an author’s use of language and the impact that this has on the reader.

Phonics Teaching Leedon Lower School

At Leedon Lower School we are committed to the delivery of excellence in the teaching of Phonics. We aim to develop each child so that they are able to read with fluency as well as develop a love of reading that will stay with our children all their lives. Being able to read is the most important skill children will learn during their early schooling and has far-reaching implications for lifelong confidence and well-being.

The use of phonics is one of the many skills needed to be able to be a reader and writer. We aim to teach high quality phonics to ensure the children have the best start possible in reading and writing. The learning of phonics is the beginning of children’s body of knowledge, skills and understanding that are an essential part of learning to read. In order to read and understand texts children must learn to recognise/decode the words on the page. Good quality phonics teaching allows the child to be secure in the skills of word recognition and decoding which allows children to read fluently. This will result in children being able to read for pleasure and will allow them to move onto developing higher order reading for meaning skills. These phonic skills need to be taught systematically and involve a variety e.g multi-sensory resources for all learners. We currently use ELS which has an exciting variety of phonics games and resources. This also allows for planning, teaching and progression to be consistent; from Reception, through to the end of Year 4.

Impact

From implementing the above, we would expect to see the following impact on our children and their learning and the impact will be under constant review.

Significant increase in the percentage of children passing the Year 1 Phonics Screening test
The whole school have access to age-appropriate texts to help harness a love of reading across the curriculum as well as for pleasure

All children will make at least good or outstanding progress in reading each year
Children identified as working at greater depth are challenged, continue to make outstanding progress and are introduced to a wider variety of texts
All children feel they achieve in reading and that their hard work and progress is recognised and celebrated
Clear and appropriate challenge for all, including the disadvantaged and vulnerable, is seen within all lessons
80% of children across the school will read at home with an adult at least four times a week.