“The more you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

(Dr Seuss.)

Central to learning is creating a life-long love of reading and at Kemsley Primary Academy, it is our belief that every child should be able to read for pleasure and to a high standard. We firmly believe that reading feeds children’s imagination and opens up a treasure house of wonder and joy for curious young minds. We also believe that every child should be given the tools to develop into an enthusiastic and confident reader both at home and at school. Reading improves language and vocabulary, inspires imagination and gives everyone the opportunity to develop and foster new interests.

 

A child's reading skills are important to their success in school as they will allow them to access the breadth of the curriculum and improve their communication and language skills. Additionally, reading can be an enjoyable and imaginative time for children, which can open doors to all kinds of new worlds for them. Through reading, children have the opportunity to develop culturally, socially and emotionally as well as reaping the benefits academically.  At Kemsley Primary Academy a ‘Love of Language’ is developed and fostered for the enjoyment, challenge and understanding of text. This love of language is developed through poetry, a variety of fictional genres, non-fiction, test questions and even through research.

 

It is our vision that readers at Kemsley Primary Academy will:

• Confidently decode and read unfamiliar texts- practice makes perfect!
• Develop fluency and expression in their reading of a variety of different text types including fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
• Choose to read for pleasure and have fun reading.
• Develop imagination using what they have read.
• Have a wide and varied vocabulary as a result of what they have read.
• Independently retrieve information from texts to improve understanding, as well as giving opinions on what they have read.
• Infer the meaning in texts and understand the purpose of different texts.

 

We do not believe in a ‘one size fits all’ approach, so our teachers are highly trained in responding to the needs of individuals. They plan carefully tailored reading tasks to suit our pupils, using the agreed scheme throughout school and beginning with Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised in EYFS.  Reading is the key to learning and comes into every aspect of the National Curriculum.  We encourage the pupils to read as much as possible both at home and at school, ensuring that we give them the tools that they need in order to make progress, whilst taking into account their ability levels and the support they may need.
 

Intent

At Kemsley we believe that all pupils should have the opportunity to be fluent, confident readers who are able to successfully comprehend and understand a wide range of texts. We want pupils to develop a love of reading, a good knowledge of a range of authors, and be able to understand more about the world in which they live through the knowledge they gain from texts. By the end of their time at primary school, all children should be able to read fluently, and with confidence, in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education. We do not put ceilings on what pupils can achieve in reading and we do not hold pre-conceptions about any pupils’ ability to make progress. We understand the importance of parents and carers in supporting their children to develop both word reading and comprehension skills, and so we want to encourage a home-school partnership which enables parents and carers to understand how to enhance the skills being taught in school through good quality texts.
 

Implementation

At Kemsley we have a structured approach to the teaching of reading. We use a wide range of reading materials and teaching methods to help children learn to read in a way which meets their needs and challenges them appropriately. Throughout school, we have a rich collection of books in order to encourage children’s desire to become readers. Our free reader library has a wide selection of books for children to choose from to encourage and foster a love of reading. Books chosen are monitored by class teachers to ensure that children are reading a variety of genres and text types.

Across our Early Years Foundation Stage and Year 1, we teach phonics by following the phonics scheme Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, and help children to learn whole words in order to develop a wide sight-vocabulary. Our aim is to teach children to not only read a text fluently, but to improve their comprehension skills as this will help children to understand and reflect upon what they have read. In Year 2, the children, if they are ready and if they have passed the Year 1 Phonics Screening Test, move away from phonics and begin to look at spelling rules and patterns. This is then continued throughout Key Stage 2.

From Reception to Year 6, Reading takes place daily. In Reception and Year 1, this is conducted in small groups and will involve lots of verbal comprehension questions from the class teacher, as well as the use of segmenting and blending to read unknown words. In Years 2-6, there is whole class, partner and independent reading.  All children will also be completing a variety of comprehension tasks based on what they have read, some independent and some guided, some verbal and some written. The types of questions children will explore are relevant to one of the key comprehension skills: discussing and exploring vocabulary; making predictions; discussing the author’s choice of language and the effect it has on a reader; summarising themes and ideas; retrieving information from the text and making inferences using clues from the text. Reading interventions are put into place for any children who need support. This takes place in the form of daily readers and occurs from Reception to Year 6 whenever it is required. In addition to this, SEND pupils who need support in their reading ability and progress, will receive extra support in the afternoons and/or through the use of the online intervention programme Nessy.

We acknowledge and value the important role played by the family in supporting children’s reading development by reading to them and listening to them read. Books are taken home on a daily basis along with a reading record so that children can be heard reading and a comment (even a brief one) can be made on at least a weekly basis. We use the Oxford Reading Tree scheme throughout the school and after being deemed capable of achieving stage 14 the pupils will become a free reader in school where they are able to choose their reading book from our free reader library.  Children in Reception and Year 1 will also be set a decodable online book each week which is matched up to the phonics sound they are currently learning.

Also, reading opportunities and developing reading skills can be seen all throughout our school curriculum being taught, from English lessons taught using high-quality texts, to subjects such as History where the children will research and read texts based upon that time e.g. Oliver Twist as part of learning about the Victorians.
 

Impact

The impact of how reading is taught at Kemsley is that all of our pupils make as much progress as they possibly can and grow up to have a love of books. They are able to read for pleasure and for any other purpose, as well as being confident in using their reading skills when tackling any unknown text. Our pupils will be prepared with the reading skills they will require in secondary education and beyond.

The impact of the way we teach reading is that:

• Pupils will enjoy reading across a range of genres.
• Pupils of all abilities will be able to succeed in all reading lessons.
• Pupils will use a range of strategies for decoding words, not solely relying on phonics.

Pupils will confidently be able to show understanding of what they have read.

• Pupils will have a good knowledge of a range of authors.
• Pupils will be ready to read in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education.
• The % of pupils working at ARE within each year group will be at least in line with national averages.
• The % of pupils working at Greater Depth within each year group will be at least in line with national averages
• There will be no significant gaps in the progress of different groups of pupils (e.g. disadvantaged vs non-disadvantaged) as all pupils will have been provided with the tools that they need in order to make as much progress as they possibly can during their journey through our school.

  

Reading Scheme

Kemsley Primary Academy uses Collins Big Cats as its main reading scheme. Children in Reception and Year 1 (and where deemed appropriate Year 2 and beyond) are given a Login for Collins Big Cats where they can access the variety of books in the e-library and a decodable phonics book is set by the class teacher on a weekly basis. Alongside this, the children are also given a book from our Collins Big Cat (CBC) scheme to share with their carer at home. We encourage children and their carers to try to read four times per week to develop fluency and understanding.  Children in Years 2-6 will then continue to progress through the reading scheme with their development being closely monitored by the class teachers and staff members. Once ready the children will be able to move off the CBC scheme and then access our free reader library where there is a wide variety of genres available and they continue to develop their reading skills, as well as reading for pleasure. This is also closely monitored by staff members to ensure that children are accessing a variety of books and continuing to read regularly.

Kemsley Primary Academy Reading for Fluency – progression in borrowing and independent fluency practice.

 

Key principles

Borrowing and independent reading is a key part of the school’s reading curriculum and integral to fostering great reading behaviours in the children. The books chosen by children should have two main aims: engendering a love of reading as a leisure activity and developing their reading fluency.  As such children can borrow two books at a time, with these aims in mind.
 

Reception and KS1 (whilst learning to decode)

Children are taught their phonic knowledge and decoding skills through the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Programme. This programme has decodable books matched to each phase. These books are used by the children to develop their reading fluency through repeated reading and practice of phonemes (sounds) they have learnt during their daily phonics lessons.
 

Children are also able to borrow a book of their choosing from the class or school library to be shared with someone at home. It is not expected that children will be able to read this book to themselves, but that it should be read to them, to develop their enjoyment of stories and interest in texts.
 

KS1 and LKS2 (progression from phonics books)

Once children have secured their phonic knowledge and progressed from the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Programme they will move from the Collins decodable phonics books, to independently reading banded books from our reading schemes. Teachers use a reading fluency assessment to establish each child’s fluency, and uses the information to assign them to a colour band, so that the books they read independently are supportive of their developing fluency skills. Children also have the opportunity to borrow a book of their choosing to enjoy at home either by themselves if they want to or, preferably, with a family member or friend.
 

KS2 (progression from reading schemes and free reading)

When children are in KS2, they should be developing good independent reading habits. They will be exposed to rich, challenging texts during their daily class reading lesson, and we aim for them to progress to becoming ‘free’ readers. Using the fluency assessment and their discretion, teachers can deem a child a ‘free’ reader if they are achieving a 95% accuracy rate on the ‘Ruby’ fluency assessment, and have good reading habits whereby they read regularly and make good choices about what to read, i.e. varied material that is not too challenging so that it prevents fluency.
 

Fiction banding in the library

In addition to the phonically decodable texts and reading scheme books provided, we have colour banded the fiction in the school library to support children in choosing books that they can be confident in reading. This system uses the Accelerated Reader ATOS readability formula to assign a complexity level to each text. We have used this as a guide and assigned a colour to our fiction books signifying the year group this might be most appropriate for, given typical fluency development. This is intended as guidance to support children and teachers in their choices, not to be used in the same way as a reading scheme.

 

Progression from Decodable books to Free reader: