At Crescent Primary School, we believe that Reading is fundamental to children’s education. We encourage and plan for a range of reading experiences so that pupils can apply their reading skills across the curriculum.
We encourage children to read widely by promoting Reading through a range of approaches that include:
Making links with children’s authors such as Gill Lewis, Bear Grylls and Tom Palmer.
Sharing class books on screen through the ‘Kindle’ app.
Reading e-books through Pearson’s ‘Bug Club’
Giving responsibilities to pupils across school through roles such as ‘Reading Leaders’ and ‘Buddy Readers’.
Holding and annual Scholastic Book Fair.
Reading books:
Our children access a wide variety of books in school. Each child takes home a reading book with a colour band to match a child’s independent reading ability. This is assessed through a range of methods including listening to them read, undertaking formal assessments and teacher judgements made in reading lessons. We ask that adults encourage reading at home, our expectation is at least 3 times a week and sign children’s red reading records. Children will be rewarded for reading at home.
The Oxford Reading Tree is the main spine of books used for our early readers. This is supplemented with a wide range of high-quality picture books, phonetically decodable books and books which rely on the child’s knowledge of sight words. The books offer a range of genre, such as plays, stories and poetry as well as non-fiction texts, such as recounts, information and instructions.
Reading lessons:
Our children take part in Reading lessons to develop their reading ability through specific teaching. Whilst the structure of Reading lessons will vary depending on the Year group of the children, the following skills are typical features of our Reading lessons:
Shared reading of a text.
Exploring vocabulary and unknown words.
Reading the text closely to develop inference
Undertaking written comprehension activities
Phonics:
We follow the DfE’s ‘Letters and Sounds’ phases to teach phonics in Foundation Stage, Year 1 and Year 2. We have created a school based long-term plan to support our teaching of Phonics.