Our Approach to Reading

At Darrick Wood Infant and Nursery School, we believe that reading is an essential life skill, and we are committed to enabling our children to become lifelong, motivated readers. At the heart of our strategy is our drive to foster a love of reading. Ensuring our children become fluent and engaged readers is our priority and our teachers are role models. We believe what makes a good reader is the ability to decode, understand, respond and develop a positive attitude, enabling children to visualise the text that they are reading. When children learn to read, they develop greater general knowledge, a wider range of vocabulary and strong oral and literacy skills, which helps children to thrive. We recognise that the ability to read is fundamental to pupil’s development and progress across the curriculum. Early reading also ignites creativity, sparks curiosity, and stimulates imagination. Starting from Nursery, children are encouraged to become early readers. We are determined that every pupil will learn to read, regardless of their background, needs or ability. We aim for all pupils to make sufficient progress to meet or exceed age-related expectations. We are committed to sharing high quality and vocabulary rich texts across the curriculum so that children may develop knowledge of themselves and the world in which they live.

Early reading is taught using the DfE approved Systematic Synthetic Phonics Programme Bug Club Phonics. Pupils are systematically taught the phonemes, how to blend the sounds together for reading, and how to segment the sound to spell words. Children are taught to use their phonics skills and knowledge as their first approach to reading.

Our phonics teaching is a whole school approach. All year groups follow the Bug Club Phonics teaching programme from Nursery to Year 2. All children in Reception and KS1 have daily twenty minutes high quality phonics lessons. We use Bug Club interactive resources to deliver interactive lessons that model the skills of segmenting and blending. We have invested in a wide range of fully decodable books including e-books and print books for school and home reading. These books are expertly colour banded to match children’s reading level.

Our rigorous and systematic phonics teaching approach enables children to make the best start with decoding and phonological awareness leading to word recognition. Learning to decode fluently and accurately allows children to become confident readers and enables learners to access all the enjoyment and excitement books can bring.

To teach reading fluency and comprehension skills, each year group has a clearly defined reading progression pathway. The reading provision includes 1:1 reading, guided group reading and whole class shared reading. We use V.I.P.E.R.S (Vocabulary, Inference, Predict, Explain, Retrieve and Sequence/ Summarise) as our strategy to explicitly teach key reading comprehension skills. We use the Bug Club Guided reading programme for guided group reading and 1:1 reading.

We also follow the Literacy Tree English Curriculum to teach reading and comprehension skills through daily English lessons. The Literacy Tree English Curriculum immerses children in a literary world, therefore creating strong levels of engagement to provide meaningful and authentic contexts for primary English. Children become critical readers and acquire an authorial style as they encounter a wide range of significant authors and a variety of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. A wide range of skills are developed through these carefully chosen high quality texts. In Key Stage One, we follow Literacy Leaves, which is a reading programme as a part of the Literacy Tree curriculum for whole class reading sessions. We focus on teaching V.I.P.E.R.S explicitly through high quality texts across a wide range of genres. Each session has a clear objective of one or two focused reading skills to focus on. Pupils have opportunities to practice and apply these skills in carefully planned reading activities in guided reading sessions.

We have a support structure in place to give further help to children, if needed according to their ability and needs. We run SEN phonics groups, Phonics intervention, Elite programme, PPG reading groups, Volunteer 1:1 reading.  We also believe oral language lays the foundation for reading and writing skills. Having a solid foundation in oral language will help children become successful readers and strong communicators.  At our school, SLTs, SENCO, class teachers and TAs are all working together to ensure all children are provided with the help they need to get off to a good start in reading.

• Use Bug Club e-books to engage home reading
• Use Boom Reader, e-reading record app to increase parental engagement in reading.
• Phonics and early reading workshops to equip parents and carers with knowledge and understanding of early reading and phonics
• School library is run by parent volunteers. Children have access to school library after school

• Engaging reading corner in each classroom
• A wide range of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry books available in book corner in each classroom
• World Book Day
• Poetry Week
• Osbourne Reading Challenge
• Writing letters to authors
• Author visits and workshop
• Visits to school Library and public library
• Bring favourite books to school day
• Books collection across the curriculum
• Celebration of World Book Day

Children will become fluent readers by the end of Key Stage One. With decoding taught as the prime approach to reading, pupils will become familiar with this strategy and have the confidence to work out unfamiliar words in any new texts they encounter even when they have come to the end of the phonics programme. We want pupils to possess the reading skills and love of literature which will help them to enjoy and access any aspects of learning they encounter in the future.

To assess children’s phonics and word reading skills, we use the Bug Club formative and summative assessment. Daily formative assessment is carried out through using the whole-class revision sessions to identify strengths and weaknesses at an early stage and to ensure we can intervene to support those who need it. Additionally, children are assessed on their ability to use taught strategies to read familiar and unfamiliar words during the main teaching session. Summative assessment activities are undertaken formally at least every six weeks, though assessments can be more frequent if needed. We use the Bug Club Phonics tracker to track children’s progress in phonics. Children who score under a certain threshold on an assessment, are considered ‘developing’ and their progression will be enabled by small group intervention or one-one support.

To assess children’s reading fluency and comprehension skills, we use the Bug Club Reading Progress and Assess programme. The programme comes with reading tests for each colour book band.  The teachers will use the reading test to check if the child has the sufficient reading fluency and comprehension skills to progress to the next level book band. We also use the Bug Club Reading skills progression tracking documents to track children’s progress in reading fluency and comprehension skills during Guided Reading and individual reading. It really helps the teachers to understand children’s progress in all the key reading fluency and comprehension skills.

At the end of the academic year, attainment in reading is measured using statutory assessments such as the end of EYFS profile, Key Stage One and following the outcomes in Year 1 and Year 2 Phonics Screening Check.

We believe that reading is the key to unlock all learning and so the impact of our reading goes beyond the statutory assessments. We give all

the children the opportunity to enter the amazing new worlds that a book opens up to them and share texts from a range of cultures or genres to inspire them to question or seek out more for themselves.

In addition to this:

• Parents and carers will have a good understanding of how they can support reading and home, and contribute regularly to home-school reading records
• The percentage of pupils pass the Year One Phonics Screening Check will be above national average
• The percentage of pupils working at ARE within each year group will be above national average
• The percentage of pupils working at Greater Depth within each year group will be above national average
• There will be no significant gaps in the progress of different groups of pupils (e.g. disadvantaged vs non-disadvantaged)