Reading
At Oakham C of E and The Parks we believe in both the importance of developing children’s discrete word-reading skills and comprehension, and the need to encourage a love of books and reading. Every child deserves the chance to become a reader and reading is a passport to the world. Reading great literature opens children up to ideas, experiences, places and times they might never otherwise experience in real life.
To promote high standards of reading, our intent is to ensure that all pupils:
· Read easily, fluently and with good understanding.
· Develop an interest in and a love of books, encouraging children to become attentive listeners, independent and reflective readers.
· Develop reading strategies and skills, accuracy, fluency, understanding and response to texts.
· Develop the ability to use and manipulate a variety of texts, both fiction and non-fiction.
· Develop children’s experiences through a variety of texts including the use of libraries, ICT and other available media.
Phonics/Early Reading
At Oakham C of E Primary and The Parks School we follow the principles and practices of Letters and Sounds across Foundation Stage and Key Stage One.
We aim:
· To provide consistent, high quality phonics teaching that ensures all children have a strong foundation upon which to tackle the complex processes of reading and writing.
· To ensure that the teaching of synthetic phonics is systematic and progressive throughout the foundation stage, key stage one and key stage two for those children needing interventions to support phonetic knowledge and understanding.
· To ensure that children have sound phonetic knowledge, understanding and skills so that they can decode words confidently and engage with higher order reading and writing skills.
Reading Pledge
At Oakham C of E, we always want to nurture and instil a love of reading in our children. We think it is hugely important for children to hear books read aloud as well as to read them themselves. Reading books aloud to children stimulates their imagination and expands their understanding of the world. It helps them develop language and listening skills and prepares them to understand the written word. We work in partnership with our parents to ensure that our children are exposed to 20 minutes of reading every day. In school we pledge to read to the children for 10 minutes each day, with the understanding that parents will match this pledge by reading at home for 10 minutes each day as well. Within school, we ensure that the children are exposed to a breadth of high quality texts and we have compiled a list of texts which all children in school are exposed to through the reading pledge during their time at Oakham C of E.
Book Talk
We have aligned our teaching of reading with Jane Considine’s ‘Book Talk’ approach. Book Talk is a systematic way to teach reading strategies across the whole school. Within Book Talk, children are organised into reading attainment groups and share a set of the same book pitched at their level. The session is layered with open-ended whole class questions to tackle retrieval, inference and comprehension. The ‘reason to read’ for each section is displayed for the children’s reference and they are given stem sentences to help them to articulate their ideas and use comprehension language effectively. Each small group is led by a nominated ‘book talk leader’. This child acts as the spokesperson for the group and can ask for input from other group members. The style of reading is dictated by the teacher and children are asked to read around the group, silently to themselves or in partners to ensure coverage.
