Reading at Repton Primary
At Repton Primary we have a wide range of approaches to teaching reading. We want all our children to be fluent readers who leave us with a high level of reading and comprehension skills. However, we also want to foster a love and enjoyment of reading and to encourage children to experience texts form a wide range of genres and authors.
School Reading Scheme.
We use a range of levelled banded readers to ensure progression in reading These include Oxford Reading Tree, Sunshine, Storyworld, Ginn and many more. Using a range of schemes ensures children are exposed to a wide range of different texts, vocabulary and genre. Children progress through these schemes as they move through the school and we expect them to read these at home as well as in school. In Key Stage 1 children are listened to on an individual basis. Children will be regularly assessed and will progress through the bands when staff assess them to be ready. This will involve developing the skills of word recognition, phonic application, inference, comprehension and expression. When the children have progressed beyond the banded books, they become free readers and select their reading books from the library.
As part of their English curriculum, all classes develop their reading through class texts, which support both their reading and writing development. They will also have the opportunity for guided reading in small groups, which are differentiated based on the needs and ability of the group. We use these guided reading sessions to ask children targeted questions which enable us, along with their individual reading, to make regular assessments of their reading progress. We foster a love of reading through our weekly class story sessions.
The school has recently invested in the provision of well stocked fiction and non-fiction libraries which are regularly updated. Key Stage One classes also have a variety of books targeted at the specific age of the children in the class.
Sometimes, for whatever reason, children may need a bit of extra support with their reading. We provide this support in a variety of ways e.g. extra reading sessions, dyslexia friendly ICT programmes and focussed reading comprehension work. Our Teaching Assistants deliver an effective intervention which teaches the skills of comprehension called 'The Secret Life of a Comprehender'.
We follow the Letters and Sounds phonics scheme across EYFS and Key stage 1. All children have a daily phonics session in a differentiated group to teach and embed skills in spelling and reading. Games and resources from Phonics Play are used to support the phonic teaching. Children are given a weekly spelling pattern/ patterns to learn at home to develop their understanding. Towards the end of Year One, the children complete the national phonics screening and an information session for parents is held in school about this.