Reading

Early Reading

We encourage parents and carers to read with their child every night. All children are provided with a blue book bag and a Home Reading Record book when they join us. We invite parents to sign or make a comment to help support their child’s reading at home. Children have the opportunity to change their reading books regularly.

We encourage a love and respect of books and it is helpful when children spend time at home talking about books and reading. Encouraging the children to ask questions and discuss what is happening in the pictures and why are good starting points. Whilst out and about, we encourage the children to look at the print around them - in shops, posters, road names, signs, etc.

Children have the opportunities to practise the phonics skills that they are developing in school through reading a range of decodable texts. These are carefully matched to their developing phonic knowledge.

We prioritise the acquisition of age appropriate reading skills, in recognition that reading is a fundamental life skill and one which underpins learning across the whole curriculum. The government’s Covid Catch-Up Funding has been used in part to implement Scholastic Benchmarking, to ensure that children’s reading books are closely matched to their ability to decode words and then comprehend well what they have read. In addition to the Benchmarking resources themselves, we have appointed a Teaching Assistant to work to ensure children are assigned to the correct level of text, raise the profile of reading across the school, and deliver one-to-one reading interventions to accelerate pupils’ attainment. Children love reading with an adult in school, and are highly motivated to move up to the next level in the Benchmarking system!