Reading at Pentland Primary School
At Pentland Primary School, we want the children to:
- Enjoy reading all genre of books and appreciate the value and worth of reading in everyday life.
- Read a range of different kinds of reading material fluently and with understanding
- Make choices about the sorts of texts that they enjoy
- Use reading skills to search for information
- Use a full range of reading cues (e.g. phonics, grammar and context)
- Read ‘between the lines’ and behind the images
- Be exposed to literature that is beyond their current experience and fluency.
We use a number of different strategies to promote a child’s love of books and encourage them to become confident, independent readers. Children are provided with many opportunities to read, enjoy and share books as well as being emerged in language rich environments with access to a breadth of vocabulary and print. We have a range of reading books for children to borrow alongside a non-fiction library that contains a wide range of reading materials to support children of all abilities.
Throughout the school day, children are provided with many opportunities to develop and strengthen their literacy skills. These include:
- Daily phonics sessions in Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1 and for those who still require it in KS2.
- 1:1 or small focused phonic intervention sessions.
- Daily supported reading sessions
- A focused reading programme in KS2 which allows for discussion, analysis and written responses to text
- A focus text used in literacy lessons
- Home reading books and a reading diary to record in
- A class novel
- Meeting real life authors
Where it has been identified that children need additional support to meet age related expectations, the school offer a range of intervention support strategies including:
- Extra daily 1:1 reading sessions with their teacher or teaching assistant.
- Phonic intervention work, either 1:1 or in a small focus group
- Computer based intervention support programmes, such as Lexia.
Our main scheme of reading books taken home by children is RWI- children take home books which match the sounds they can sound-blend and that have few exception words, re reading books to build up fluency.
The Red Ditty Books offer children practice in reading short decodable passages that form an important bridge between reading single words and whole sentences. They reinforce the Read Write Inc. Phonics Set 1 sounds. Each book contains three fun and humorous passages with linked reading activities. They also prepare children for reading the Storybooks.
The Storybooks (Green to Grey Levels) are carefully matched to children’s growing phonic knowledge so children can read them with accuracy, fluency and comprehension. The Storybooks include a range of engaging stories such as fairy tales, myths and legends, rhyming stories and familiar settings. Activities at the start help children to practise the sounds and words they will encounter in the story. Questions to talk about at the end of the story provide an extra opportunity for developing children’s comprehension.
To ensure that we provide a curriculum which supports children in learning to read and reading to learn, our reading curriculum triangulates a variety of strategies to ensure that all areas of reading are covered effectively. First and foremost, our approach to reading ensures a phonic programme (RWI) is ambitious in expectations of the sounds, words and texts that children should be able to read by the end of each term. We have a ‘phonics from the start’ approach as phonics is taught from nursery but it also prioritises a love of reading through book talk.
