Reading

Tibberton’s approach to Reading

We want our children to grow in wisdom; to cultivate a wide-ranging knowledge that will help broaden life chances; to develop the spiritual, intellectual and emotional resources they need to live a good life; and to develop the character to live well together in community, whilst preparing them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of future life. We want our learners to live out ‘life in all its fullness’. 

This is impossible without the skill of reading.

Our ultimate aim is for the children to become confident and independent readers with high levels of enjoyment, understanding and comprehension, whilst promoting enjoyment of reading and the understanding that reading is a life-long skill. At Tibberton CE First School we believe that success in reading has a direct effect upon progress in all other areas of the Curriculum and is crucial in developing children’s self-confidence and motivation. We support children’s development as they become enthusiastic and critical readers of stories, poetry, drama and non-fiction and media texts. We want children to develop a love for literature. We strive to build upon a wide vocabulary base and develop a capacity to convey meaning through a range of high quality texts.

We believe that becoming a fluent reader plays a vital role in preparing our children for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life.

The teaching of reading is made of up of two parts: word reading and fluency and comprehension. These sit side by side in the making of successful reader.

Reading is taught through phonics sessions, English lessons, whole class reading, shared reading, guided reading sessions, individual reading, whole class story time and opportunities to practise and consolidate skills through independent reading.

Word reading and fluency~ Systematic Synthetic Phonics as the main approach to reading.

Pupils are systematically taught through our school scheme: ‘Phonics Overview’

As part of this scheme the children will be taught:

• To use their phonic skills and knowledge as their first approach to reading
• To discriminate between the separate sounds in words
• To blend the sounds all through the word for reading
• To study written representations of a sound and how it looks
• To learn high-frequency words which do not completely follow phonic rules.
• To segment the sounds in order to write words

Progress is continually reviewed and children are formally assessed at the end of each term. The National Phonics Screening Check is performed in June of Year 1.

Prior to this, the Year 1 phonics workshop gives parents information about how they can support their children at home with phonics. The purpose of the screening check is to confirm that all children have learned phonic decoding to an age-appropriate standard.

The children who did not meet the required standard for the check in Year 1 enter again in Year 2 with additional support. As children enter KS2 provision is made for those children still requiring the teaching of phonics.

Comprehension

We explicitly teach the specific skills of comprehension using VIPERS in reading lessons and embed these skills through their application across the wider curriculum. These skills are taught from Reception through to Year 4 following our progression of skills. Please see the attached documents for further information.

We have produced and ‘Parent/Carer friendly’ guide to show what this might look like in your child’s year group. This is in line with the statutory requirements of the National Curriculum 2014 and the Early Year Foundation Stage (EYFS) Statutory Framework.

If you would like more details please do not hesitate to contact the school.