Reading AT SOUTH GREEN
How We Teach Reading
Reading Aims
Teaching children to read is one of the most important aspects of every child’s learning.
Children need to be taught the knowledge and skills to become confident and effective readers, so that they can read for both pleasure and information.
We want the children in our school to:
● make choices about the sorts of texts they enjoy
● read between the lines and behind the images
● read fluently and with understanding a range of different kinds of reading
material, using reading methods that are appropriate to the material and the
reading purpose
● use a full range of reading cues (phonics, grammar and context)
● to gain library skills
● to enjoy reading books
● to use reading skills to search for information
At South Green Junior School we believe that when home and school work in partnership together pupils can benefit from this support to make more progress reading fluency, confidence and understanding.
Reading Skills:
Phonics is taught systematically in Years 3 and, where needed, in Year 4 through the Letters and Sounds programme.
We know that phonic understanding is only part of the process of developing reading and that once children can recognise and pronounce words with growing confidence, that there are additional skills that need to be learnt and practised. These include: summarising stories, clarifying understanding, predicting, skimming & scanning as well as inferring & deducing.
Guided Reading:
These skills are developed through daily Guided Reading sessions.
Every class will complete a 20 minute Guided Reading session each day. The children are grouped according to reading ability so that the teacher can focus on their specific needs. Children are engaged in quality independent or group literacy tasks. E.g. follow-on comprehension, poetry, newspapers, magazines, listening post, kindles, topic books.
Reading Resources:
At South Green Junior School we source books from a range of schemes, choosing the most appropriate texts for the children e.g Oxford Reading Tree.
As the children progress their reading skills they move on to selecting their own reading books to take home. We encourage children to make independent book choices, that we hope will inspire and excite them to engage in reading independently, and read for pleasure in their own leisure time.
Additional Approaches:
We use additional materials to support reading where this is need through interventions such as phonic awareness (teaching children to blend and segment sounds using synthetic phonics), Catch Up Reading/Reading Race, One to One pupil: adult sessions and Reading Comprehension groups. We also use teacher assessment and marking of work to identify areas in which pupils need additional support.
In addition to class based reading, children can also develop their enjoyment for reading throughout school. They have the opportunity to access the school library to choose from a wider range of books on a weekly basis and children in higher year groups have the opportunity to become library monitors. Every classroom has reading resources which further promote and encourage reading for pleasure.