Reading Photos
Learning Intention
We believe that a love of reading runs parallel with the progression of word recognition and language comprehension as children move through the school. Children are exposed to high quality texts at all ages and the teaching team are highly skilled in ensuring children are reading texts best suited to their interests and phonetic capability. Children are exposed to a positive and rich reading culture so they become life-long readers, prepared for the ever changing world - reading is a gateway to the world and understanding what is around us, and we endeavour for children to foster a love of reading through valuable experiences, along with support for them to develop the fundamental understanding of what they have read, preparing them for wider-world experiences.
We believe in modelling and leading by example here at Meadowbank, promoting role models within our children. We have reading buddies across the key stages, targeting our early readers and allowing them opportunities to read and share with the older children in school. Our UKS2 buddies are well trained in supporting both fluency and decoding as well as providing challenge and discussion where fit during their sessions each week.
Aims
- To develop life-long readers with a love of literature
- To embed and develop a progression of skills in inference through text and images.
- To enable children to make their own choices in texts
- To provide children with rich texts to develop their awareness of vocabulary and the world around them.
Learning Journey
Reading is a gateway to the rest of the curriculum and the world around each and every child and here at Meadowbank, every child is given the key to that gateway of possibilities. It is important to equip the children with the essential skills and experiences, which underpin the early teaching of reading and in Foundation Stage, the children are immersed in an environment to support their development of Spoken Language, Physical Activity, Meta-Linguistic awareness and opportunities to symbolise these skills through facilitated activities.
Within Early Years and Key stage 1, the Letters and Sounds synthetic phonics programme is followed, where children progress through the phases through discrete daily sessions, which follow a 4-point plan: Revisit and Review, Teach, Practise and Apply. Our children are then exposed to high quality experiences to allow them to apply these discrete skills into their wider environment. All our staff in school receive regular training to ensure they are confident and secure in the teaching of early reading, drawing upon expertise across the school – we see all staff as teachers of reading and ensure appropriate training and professional development opportunities are provided to allow adults to reflect on their own expertise and develop themselves as life-long learners.
The teaching team have worked collaboratively to plan a progression of Literature from FS to Year 6, to ensure children are given opportunities to read a wealth of texts that both engage and challenge them.
Text choices have been made, taking into consideration the content, vocabulary, the themes covered, and the author, so that we can offer our children an enriching reading capital to develop them as life-long readers.
At Meadowbank, a whole approach to the delivery of group reading sessions is followed, allowing flexibility where necessary and progression to be seen across the key stages. We encourage the use of a whole class text, where possible, in order to ensure wide and rich exposure to high quality texts to ALL children. Our teaching team are highly skilled in providing children with purposeful experiences to develop the following key skills that the children are assessed against at the end of KS1 and KS2.
|
KS1 |
KS2 |
|
Retrieval Inference Sequence Understand the meaning of words Predict |
Retrieval Inference Comparison Understand the meaning of words Summarise Predict Explain word choices for effect Comment on text structure |
As the children move into Key stage 2, group reading is taught daily, alongside 1:1 readers and personalised programmes, with explicitly taught skills through the use of the VIPERS acronym (Vocabulary, Infer, Retrieve, Predict, Explain, and Summarise). We have a clear teaching sequence, where all teachers plan opportunities over the week for children to:
- Read independently and aloud to adults to develop fluency
- Discuss the text with adults to support their articulation
- Question their peers and deepen their thinking
- Apply their understanding to explicit skill based learning
- Become familiar with unseen texts and responding to these
Learning Environment and Immersion
Reading and writing are promoted and celebrated across our school, where children are excited to share their learning with others; through displays, vocabulary and literature; and through shared curriculum planning and our cross curricular approach, thus emphasising the importance of reading for writing, alongside reading for pleasure.
Across school, we believe that every adult is a teacher of reading and early reading to ensure our children are provided with the necessary support, challenge and stimulus to progress as independent and life-long readers. The teaching team use technical and consistent vocabulary with the children to ensure children progress securely, from early phonics to embedding the use of reading vocabulary and skills in VIPERS (vocabulary, inference, retrieval, prediction, explanation and summarise) across Key stage 2. Children are provided with opportunities for additional support, where needed, to help them meet the age related expectations, based upon priorities and targets set through individual class teachers – the teaching team work closely together within directed and focus groups within lessons, as well as well-planned and structured personalised programmes to support individual children.
Additionally, children are encouraged to read daily at home and we use a colour coded banded system throughout the school to support children in choosing accessible texts, which then support the progress to read and make book choices freely. In support of this, parents are invited to attend both reading and phonics workshops throughout the year held by leaders in school aimed to promote the importance of reading and build awareness and confidence in support of school practises at home.
We are proud of the reading community we have fostered over the years and the enrichment we offer to our children here at Meadowbank through:
- Read independently and aloud to adults to develop their fluency
- Our skilled team invite parents in to attend reading workshops for Foundation Stage, Key stage 1 and Key stage 2, sharing the expectations and offering resources and support for at home.
- All our classes visit our school Library weekly, where they will share a book together or use their library card to choose their own book.
- In Foundation stage, we host mystery readers, encourage parents to share stories and are a part of the Book trust Book start, gifting books to our early readers.
- In Key stage 2, there are opportunities to join book clubs held at lunch time with skilled adults in school, developing questioning and thinking.
- As a whole school, we celebrate World Book day yearly, dedicating a week to sharing and exploring a text as whole school from FS 1 to Year 6 (previous texts have included Perfectly Norman and the Invisible by Tom Percival, allowing us to touch on current issues and themes within our school and wider community)
- There are regular 'Drop Everything and Read' events in school
- Our classes aim to visit our Local Cheadle Library yearly to learn more about reading in our community.
Our approach to an immersive curriculum allows fluent application to be made across the curricular allowing children to make purposeful links. The skills that children develop are linked to, and applied in, every subject - the skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening enable them to communicate and express themselves in all areas of their work at school. Literacy skills are also highlighted and specifically targeted in reading and writing across the curriculum to enable the children to practise and embed their skills and write with a clear purpose.
Assessment for Learning
Reading assessment are captured through a collection of formative and summative approaches to inform the teaching team where the children are within the age related expectations.
In reading these include: the use of the reading skills age related expectations; the Salford reading test scores taken at the beginning and end of the school year; termly assessments; 1:1 reading; reading and phonics sessions within class, and each year group’s curriculum journals, which clearly outline the medium term planning and learning journey across a half term. The sequence of learning is evident in each child’s literacy skills book and highlights of this are captured and evidenced through the curriculum journal as the theme of each term progresses.
Personalised short term planning ensures that teachers plan for children to demonstrate their understanding of different text genres, grammatical techniques and reading skills in a range of settings, and ensures that this enables them to show both their fluency, knowledge, application understanding and comprehension skills to the best of their ability. This may include videos, voice recordings, cross-curricular writing, verbal discussions, feedback from personalised programs, the use of our learning toolkits and assessment data. Feedback is given verbally to the children wherever possible to develop further discussion and to address the children’s misconceptions and make accelerated progress towards meeting and exceeding the age related expectations.
Monitoring and review
The Literacy Leader is responsible for the rigorous monitoring of reading and writing through book and planning looks, pupil voice, lesson pop ins and whole school CPE. Ongoing analysis of outcomes enables the Literacy Leader to identify vulnerable groups of children across school and support the teaching team in enabling children within these groups to accelerate progress. Feedback to the teaching team then informs next steps in monitoring and support so that there can be personalised and effective JPD planned to address areas for development, through whole school training or more personalise coaching plans. Our children are involved in this monitoring process in a number of ways across the academic year. Children are empowered to talk about their learning through the curriculum journals and their own books during pupil voice opportunities. Our children can talk how the skills they develop in reading and writing link to other areas of the curriculum and wider world.
