At South View Infant and Nursery we are committed to raising standards in reading and enabling each and every child to become a confident reader, with a life-long love of books and of reading.

At South View Infant and Nursery we aim to:

• encourage a love of reading by making it an accessible, successful and enjoyable experience;

• produce effective readers;

• provide a wide and stimulating variety of texts;

• build up a sound base of reading strategies using phonetical awareness;

• develop initial and advanced reading skills through book talk;

Reading Scheme Books

Reading is an important part of the English curriculum in our school. Home reading books are organised on a banding system through progressive reading phases before accessing book banded books ensuring the children read books appropriate to their level (the children’s reading is at least 95% accurate in these books). These books are provided and sent home every day for parents to read with their children before being returned on the child’s designated reading day with an adult. When children have a secure knowledge of their phonetical understanding, they are then monitored and assessed to ensure books match their current attainment. Assessing a child’s reading speed (words per minute), word accuracy (incorrect, misread or omitted words) and comprehension are used to track a child’s progress.

As a school we have a large number of exciting reading books available. The scheme books include Big Cat Phonics, Pearson Phonic Bugs, Oxford Reading Tree Phonics, X Project in addition to a range of real books.

Teaching of Reading

In class, teachers model reading strategies in a language-rich environment during shared reading sessions, whilst children have the opportunity to develop reading strategies and to discuss texts in detail during these frequent sessions. Children are taught what good listening looks like. Children are taught to become confident in discussing books, comparing books and sharing personal responses to what they have read. Our aim is for our children to become fluent in reading and the skills of decoding, predicting, sequencing, inference and summarising. For the most fluent readers, reading lessons present them with challenging questions and opportunities for reflective independent study. The texts that are used in our reading curriculum are carefully chosen to provide our children with a broad range of authors and topics to deepen knowledge of current learning journeys and to engage with all readers. Class reading journals are used in Year 1 to document discussions, individuals comments and support reading skills. Individual reading journals are used for children in Year 2.

Each classroom has visual displays of books that they have shared as a class. We want all children to be successful and broad readers who can compare and contrast books and have opinions about books, characters and themes. Each classroom has a reading corner with front facing books to engage children and support visual stimulation to compare and contrast known texts.

Phonics

Phonics is taught daily in Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage One through our own ‘Systematic Synthetic Phonic’ (SSP) scheme after training and support from English Hubs in 2019. Each session includes a review, teach, practise and apply stage. This involves a 30 minute daily session (20 minutes in EYFS) of planned systematic phonics’ delivery, with a wide opportunity for application of skills through the environment and other lessons. Where appropriate, additional reading and phonic interventions are in place for our lowest 20% of readers or those who have been identified as requiring additional support. Each child’s phonetical accuracy is measured at least every half term through our SSP and children are grouped based on their current attainment.

Reading Rewards

All children choose books to read as well as choosing a book from the school library. Every child visits our fantastic school library every week to read books and select a book to take home. We always encourage all readers to share a book at home with their grown-ups and have in school challenges to support reading. We believe that reading aloud is invaluable to not only develop reading skills, but also supports a lifelong love of talking and listening, turn taking, social communication as well as supporting reading itself.

Many exciting and rewarding activities are arranged in school to promote the pleasure and knowledge that can be gained from books such as:

• Taking part in World Book Day
• Regular School Library Service (SLS) exchanges
• Using SLS at home
• Travelling Book Fair
• Visiting Authors
• New books for class libraries (e.g. graphic novels and visiting author texts)
• Library monitors working with our school librarian