Early Reading at Broughton Moor Primary School
Through our Early Reading programme we aim to foster a lifelong love of reading by promoting reading for pleasure and creating a culture where children choose to read for their own enjoyment. We carefully select texts and we give children the opportunity to discuss new ideas and develop empathy with characters they meet along the way. As a staff, we are passionate about teaching reading in an exciting and progressive way; giving children the tools and skills required to be successful.
Intent
We aim to ensure that all pupils:
- Can read developmentally appropriate texts confidently and fluently;
- Choose to read for their own enjoyment and become passionate lifelong readers;
- Acquire strong understanding and comprehension skills through challenging discussions;
- Progress to being able to analyse the authors choice of writing conventions and how these impact the reader;
- Have the opportunity to read a broad variety of quality texts from different genres and authors;
- Have opportunities to read across the curriculum and use texts to discover and retrieve information;
- Acquire a rich and varied vocabulary;
- Can demonstrate strong speaking and listening skills and are confident in participating in debates and drama activities;
- Use the literature that they have explored to inspire their own writing.
Key Stage 1 Reading & Phonics Provision
We teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Nursery/Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.
As a result, all our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read. We also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum. We have a strong focus on language development for our children because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.
Comprehension
We encourage our children to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose and, because we believe teaching every child to read is so important, we have a Reading Leader who supports the effective implementation of the early reading programme in our school.
Implementation
The foundations for phonics begins in our Nursery provision. We provide a balance of child-led and adult-led experiences for all children that meet the curriculum expectations for ‘Communication and Language’ and ‘Literacy’. These include:
- Sharing high-quality stories and poems
- Learning a range of nursery rhymes and action rhymes
- Activities that develop focused listening and attention, including oral blending
- Attention to high-quality language.
We ensure Nursery children are well prepared to begin learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and blending in Reception.
Daily Phonics Lessons in Reception and Year 1
We teach phonics for 30 minutes a day. In Reception, we build from 10-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to the full-length lesson as quickly as possible. Each Friday, we review the week’s teaching to help children become fluent readers.
Children make a strong start in Reception: teaching begins in Week 2 of the Autumn term.
Below outlines the teaching sequence for Little Wandle. We follow the sequence in our teaching, but ensure that the children are learning sounds at an appropriate level for their developmental stage:
Children in Reception are taught to read and spell words using Phase 2 and 3 GPCs, and words with adjacent consonants (Phase 4) with fluency and accuracy.
Children in Year 1 review Phase 3 and 4 and are taught to read and spell words using Phase 5 GPCs with fluency and accuracy.
Keep-up Lessons Ensure Every Child Learns to Read
Any child, who needs additional practice, has Keep-Up Support, taught by a fully trained adult. Keep-up lessons match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures, resources and mantras, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every child secures their learning.
We timetable daily phonics lessons for any child in Year 2 who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the Phonics Screening Check. These children urgently need to catch up, so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen.
Teaching Reading: Reading Practice Sessions Three Times a Week
We teach children to read through reading practice sessions three times a week. These:
- Are taught by a fully trained adult to small groups of approximately six children;
- Use books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments and book matching grids on pages 11–20 of ‘Application of phonics to reading’;
- Are monitored by the class teacher, who rotates and works with each group on a regular basis.
Each reading practice session has a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory. The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills:
- Decoding
- Prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression
- Comprehension: teaching children to understand the text.
Home Reading
Children are given decodable reading books to take home and practise their reading with. These contain previously taught sounds and the focus sounds which children are learning.
Reading for pleasure books also go home for parents/guardians to share and read to children.
Ensuring Consistency and Pace of Progress
All staff teaching Phonics have been trained to teach the Little Wandle Scheme, so we have the same expectations of progress. We all use the same language, routines and resources to teach children to read so that we lower children’s cognitive load.
Weekly content grids map each element of new learning to each day, week and term for the duration of the programme.
Lesson templates, prompt cards and how to videos ensure teachers all have a consistent approach and structure for each lesson.