Reading and Phonics

READING AND PHONICS

Great importance is placed on reading and developing in all of our children,  that important, life-long love of reading.   The teaching of English at St. Mary’s places children’s literature at its core. Children build a literary repertoire; exploring a range of literary texts and developing a knowledge of significant authors as they move throughout the school.

The use of high-quality literature is important at St. Mary’s . We believe it expands horizons, opening minds to concepts and themes such as love, war and justice to develop a sense of empathy, as well as providing vital insights into historical settings with geographical and scientific knowledge woven within as part of the narrative.

A rigorous and sequential approach to the reading curriculum develops pupils’ fluency, confidence and enjoyment in reading.  Reading is taught initially via high quality and pacy daily phonics sessions following the ‘Read, Write, Inc’ scheme. There is a sharp focus on ensuring that younger children gain phonics knowledge and language comprehension necessary to read, and the skills to communicate, giving them the foundations for future learning. Children are taught to read through phonetically decodable reading books supported by daily high-quality phonics lessons. Books from the Read, Write Inc scheme; Rigby Star, Floppy Phonics, Songbird phonics, Project X and Rigby Star are used for home readers at KS1. In KS2, a variety of reading schemes are used in school including Oxford Reading Tree, Oxford Project X, Collins Big Cat and well-known, popular novels. . 

Children take part in whole class reading of age appropriate, stimulating,  challenging texts to develop their vocabulary and continue to build on their reading and comprehension skills whilst fostering that all important love of reading. Children are immersed in high quality texts through highly effective questioning based on focused reading domains to develop their skills of prediction, inference, retrieval, sequencing , authorial choice and understanding vocabulary. Guided reading sessions take place in all year groups and for Reception from when children and are able to blend. 

In 2019, we introduced Accelerated Reader- an online platform that provides quizzes to check children’s underdstanding of the books they have read and supports children in making choices for further books to read, This runs from Year 2 up to Year 6. 

If you want to know more about Accelerated Reader you can follow this link

http://www.renlearn.co.uk/accelerated-reader/

Accelerated Reader – UK, Ireland and International Accelerated Reader is a powerful tool for monitoring and managing independent reading practice while promoting reading for pleasure. www.renlearn.co.uk

From the Accelerated Reader website you can also download the Accelerated Reader App and the Book Finder.  You can use these with the Login and Password you will find in your child’s Reading Planner.