Reading for Pleasure

At Paddox, reading is at the heart of our curriculum, and we are committed to enabling our children to gain a life-long love of reading and books. We understand that every child’s journey of becoming a confident, fluent reader is a unique, contextual and complex process which can be largely influenced by a range of social and demographic factors. Therefore, in order for our children to properly understand and comprehend themselves and the world in which they live, they must be exposed to a wide range of high-quality, thought provoking and vocabulary rich literature. This will lay both the necessary foundations for building strong levels of cultural capital and develop their acquisition and genuine love of language and wider reading.

Phonics
To ensure all children – irrelevant of individual needs and starting points – make immediate and accelerated progress in the development of early reading, systematic synthetic phonics is taught from EYFS. The Unlocking Letters and Sounds Scheme is used to explicitly teach daily phonics across Early Years and Key Stage One and provides a superb foundation in reading. Parental involvement is key to a child’s success in reading and phonics. When parents and carers actively engage in their child’s learning, it reinforces what we teach in school, leading to better outcomes. Research consistently shows that children whose parents are involved in their education perform better academically. Parents are invited to a workshop during Autumn Term 1, which highlights key messages including how they can help.

Whole Class Reading
In EYFS and KS1 all children read aloud weekly during guided reading sessions. Each session gives opportunities to teach and practice decoding, fluency and prosody, with every child having at least one guided reading session a week. In Key Stage Two, children are exposed to high quality texts and thought-provoking questioning during daily, whole class reading lessons which enable children to read aloud frequently. To consolidate children’s prior and new knowledge of authors and genres, teachers take every opportunity to identify contextual and cross-curricular links within each text. In each session, children are taught to develop their key reading and reviewing skills of decoding, vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval and summarising. Across the school we recognise the importance of children developing a rich and extensive bank of vocabulary.

Individual Reading
In EYFS and Year One, the Ransom Reading Stars Phonics reading books are designed to support and complement the Unlocking Letters and Sounds SSP (Systematic Synthetic Phonics). The books support all Phases of the programme, from Phase 2 through to Phase 5. All of the books are fully decodable at all stages, including at each stage only those letters and sounds and common exception words (CEW) that the children will have already met. The children are given an ULAS phonic book to take home, this book is to be read on three occasions. First for decoding, second for fluency and third for prosody. After the book has been read on three different occasions, the book is changed. When children have successfully passed the KS1 phonics screening check, they will then move to colour banded books according to their reading ability. From Year Two, the children complete a Salford Reading Assessment termly to identify a child’s reading and comprehension age. Once reading at an age above eight years,

Class Readers
Across the school, at points throughout each day, every teacher understands the importance of, and makes times for, reading aloud to their class as a priority. This deliberate routine of reading for pleasure whilst regularly modelling high standards of fluency and confidence, further deepens the children’s engagement, awareness and love of reading.

Thanks to the well-familiarised and highly scaffolded approach to the teaching and learning of reading at Paddox Primary, the children know more and remember more over time with regards to the content of high-quality literature, significant authors, book talk and personal recommendations. As a result, children feel confident when reading for an audience and discussing the purposes of texts. The teaching and learning of phonics/reading is constantly adapted and tailored to every class’/child’s need, and never delivered in isolation. It is through this personalised and responsive approach, that we strive to develop our children into articulate and imaginative communicators who are well-equipped with the basic skills, knowledge and experiences needed to becoming life-long readers. We therefore take great pride in how our nurturing, engaging and inquisitive reading curriculum embeds an intrinsic value in reading that naturally creates curious minds and an ever-increasing awareness of how reading can impact on their wider life, future aspirations and achievements; they see the bigger picture!

• Reading for pleasure
• Access to the school library