Prospect Hill Infant And Nursery School

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Reading

It is our intent at Prospect Hill Infant and Nursery to provide pupils with a high-quality education in English that will teach pupils to speak, read and write fluently so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions to others effectively.

We value reading as a key life skill and we are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers. We believe reading is key to academic success and so to ensure we have a holistic approach to reading.

We intend to encourage all pupils to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction to develop their knowledge of themselves and the world in which they live, to establish an appreciation and love of reading, to gain knowledge across the curriculum and develop their comprehension skills. It is our intention to ensure that, by the end of their primary education, all pupils are able to read fluently, and with confidence.

Intent

At Prospect Hill Infant and Nursery School, we teach reading by meeting the requirements of the National Curriculum. We aim to deliver a high-quality education which teaches pupils to read accurately and with good comprehension so that they can effectively access the world in which they live. We want them to develop a love of reading, reading with good pace, fluency and expression in a range of contexts.

Implementation

We aim to deliver quality first teaching that follows a carefully planned sequence of lessons through exposure to high quality texts. The progression of skills document for reading show how knowledge and skills are built up over time. We provide the children with opportunities to explore precise and enriched vocabulary to use within the context of the lesson and to connect to wider subject areas. Reading is taught in each year group progressively, using a wide variety of quality texts. We want children to become independent readers who choose to read for pleasure.  Where appropriate, links are also made to ensure that children’s social, moral, spiritual and cultural development is enhanced through their reading experiences.

Reading forms the core of our curriculum. All children read. Books are selected by teachers with the knowledge of how they link to other areas of the curriculum.

• Early reading and writing is prioritised and is taught using a systematic synthetic phonics programme. The books that children read in school and at home are at the right level of difficulty and match exactly the order in which sounds have been taught in the programme. Children are taught phonics daily from F1 and sessions increase in length as they move through Foundation Stage and into Key Stage One
• Reading Scheme –once the children are fluent readers the school uses a variety of different reading schemes to provide a wide variety of appropriate quality texts for children to read covering all genres. The schemes incorporated into our reading provision include: Oxford Reading Tree, Project X, real books and The Power of Reading recommended texts. All books are Book Banded in order to ensure progression and challenge for all children.
• Individual Reading – all children read individually.
• Guided Reading – all children from F2 upwards take part in a weekly guided reading session. These focus on reading strategies as well as teach a range of techniques which enable children to comprehend the meaning of what they read.
• Class Guided Reading- these daily sessions are used to practise reading skills.
• Reading Areas -All classrooms have class reading areas with topic themed books and author books. All classrooms have access to the library.
• Purple Mash - All children have access to Purple Mash which is web-based. They can access this at home and school. There are stories they can read on here.
• Core Stories- These are books which form the basis of a literature curriculum and the collection has been designed to introduce children to a growing range of texts.  Whilst some children in the class may not be able to read all the books independently, an important function of the collection is to give them access to a wider range of titles, authors and genres than they might otherwise meet.
• Browser Books-All classes have Browser Books, which are high quality story books. All children are given the opportunity to take home and share a book. These are changed weekly.
• Author of the Half term-all children are given the opportunity to read and listen to a range of books by the same author and compare their work to that of other authors.
• Parents/Carers in Partnership -Parents are encouraged to read with their child at least three times a week and record it in a reading record.

The sequence of teaching involves:

• Selecting and reading high quality texts which enrich children’s knowledge and experiences.
• Teaching challenging vocabulary with cross curricular links.
• Developing pace, fluency and expression when reading.
• Teaching and developing the skills of understanding and using vocabulary, inferring, clarifying, summarising and sequencing, predicting, retrieving and questioning.

Impact