Reading
At Mount Pleasant Primary School, we have a systematic approach to reading, which endeavours to ensure that all children make sufficient, or above, progress across their time in our care. We follow the National Curriculum programme of study, to ensure that the children are achieving attainment relevant to their appropriate age, but we do not believe in putting a ceiling on a child’s ability and therefore always strive to challenge children to achieve the best that they possibly can. We aim to ...
We whole heartedly believe that reading is the key to our children’s success, which is why it is at the centre of our curriculum and transferable across all subjects. Our reading diet ranges from phonetically matched books to fiction, non-fiction, poetry, SAT booklets (for year 6) and archaic texts. Reading is taught daily and systemically across school where lessons are progressive, and skills build year upon year. Reception and Year 1 receive daily phonics following Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised as well as reading practise sessions. Year 2 move away from this and towards whole class-based reading sessions. In KS2, we teach through whole class lessons where each class novel is used as the basis of the lesson on Monday’s and Friday’s and one text used across Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. These three lessons include a focus on fluency oracy and comprehension skills. We follow the Lingfield Trust guidance and endpoints to ensure that our children are fed the entire reading curriculum diet and to ensure that assessments are accurate for phonics, fluency and comprehension and carry out formative and summative assessments in line with all other schools in Lingfield Education Trust.
Phonics
Phonics in Reception
At Mount Pleasant, as much as possible, children move through the order of sounds together. Any children who need additional support to keep up are prioritised between sessions to ensure that learning gaps do not appear or widen. Phonics is taught as a whole class which is led by the teacher and is supported by highly-qualified and trained teaching assistants both within lessons and through Keep Up sessions. Phonics is taught for 30 minutes a day with daily opportunities for oral blending games.
Nursery
Our children begin Foundations for Phonics on entry to school. Many activities planned include opportunities for focused auditory skills like listening, rhyming, identifying sounds through games, using natural objects and body percussion. The children play with rhythm and alliteration. Other activities include dough disco, squiggle while you wiggle and activities to develop find and gross motor skills ready for writing.
Keep Up and Rapid Catch Up
Any child who needs additional practice has daily Keep Up support, taught by a fully-trained adult. These lessons are similar to whole class lessons, but in smaller steps with continual repetition. These sessions are approximately 10-15 minutes long and focus on oral blending.
We do aim and expect most of our children to successfully complete the phonics programme by the end of year 1, however, we do recognise that children may benefit from additional support. Rapid Catch-up lessons are timetabled for any child in Year 2 or above who are not fully fluent or who has not passed their phonic screening check.
Phonics Catch Up
Children with SEND who require further adaptations are taught the Little Wandle SEND programme. Staff are all skilled and trained in the delivery of this programme, this includes our provision children if appropriate. Each child is assessed based on their individual needs and starts the programme at the appropriate place.
Reading Across School
Reception and Year 1
We follow the principles and strategies using our Trust Ready Curriculum for Early Years. The promise to our children is that they will experience at least 5 language rich experiences every day: high quality stories, non-fiction books, rhymes, songs, poems and more. By following this strategy, this will develop our children’s knowledge with increasing complexity as the year progresses. This then transfers into Year 1, where children are exposed to texts within English lessons as well as during story time. Activities shared are focused on further developing listening and attention and there is a focus on high-quality language. The children also have daily story time where an adult will share a book with the whole class.
Year 2
Children in Year 2 continue to read decodable books throughout the Autumn term and as far as needed due to considering the stage and not age of the child. Whole class teaching involves a structured approach with a focus on consolidating phonic sounds, sight vocabulary, increasing children's vocabulary and fluency through short text extracts. The children also participate in daily quizzes to build comprehension skills in low stake quizzes. We emphasise a reinforcement of phonics, building new language as well as improving fluency across the year. Comprehension is not just written answers, but instead builds on speaking and listening skills, respond and reason and a focus on increasing confidence and an understanding of the text read.
Key Stage 2
From Year 3, our school timetable includes daily reading lessons, two which are based around the class novel, and the other three days which focus on a singular text. We also have a daily novel session where the class teacher will share a story for the children to listen to and follow along with for at least fifteen minutes.
Our children are exposed to fluent, expressive reading alongside a variety of new language structures. Across each half term, our children are also exposed to a variety of text types, including fiction, non-fiction, songs and poetry. Some of these texts are whole and some are extracts. There are opportunities to read for a range of purposes, e.g. persuasion, discussion, entertainment, information. These texts are progressive, however, not set in stone. They can change to an alternative which could be something that the children are passionate about, themes days in the year, i.e. Black History Month or texts that support wider personal development through links with PSHE and British Values.
Monday and Friday lessons focus on the class novel. Summarising and sequencing, prediction, author intent, inference and explanations are a focus point. Tuesdays are fluency which we aim to improve for all by the end of KS2. Wednesday lessons focus on oracy where children may participate in discussions about the text, debates, create speeches etc and Thursday’s lesson is about practising written responses through comprehension and deep-thinking questions.
Parental Engagement
Parent Support
To get the best out of our children, we need a true partnership with our parents. At Mount Pleasant, we value our relationship with our parents and the support they play in helping with their child’s education. Our parents are strongly encouraged to attend workshops on reading and phonics to help them to understand how phonics and reading fluency is taught and enable them to support their child’s learning at home. We have videos on Dojo to guide parents in how to help children segment and blend at home when reading with their children. We share information, have tea and chat sessions, post messages about reading and the benefit of sharing books and include book fairs at parent’s evening to ensure that our parents purchase how quality books for their children.
Expectations
We expect all children to read at least three times per week at home. This is monitored and tracked by staff in school. Any children who do not read at home and are at risk of falling behind will be given additional reading opportunities with an adult in school. We do encourage children to take responsibility of this more in KS2.
Reading at Home EYFS and KS1
Children in Reception and KS1 take two types of books home to read:
•Reading practice books are the first which are decodable and include sounds that have ben recently learned. These books reinforce previous learning in school. This follows Little Wandle recommendations and teacher judgements following phonics assessments.
•Free choice books are the second. These books are age appropriate for the child, however, do not necessarily match the children’s reading ability. These free choice books are to encourage reading for pleasure and are books that would be read by parents to the child for the child to enjoy.
Reading at Home KS2
Children in KS2 also take two types of books home to read:
•Accelerated Reader book. Each KS2 child has an ability appropriate book which is matched to their reading band, this is dictated by Accelerated Reader. The children read these books and upon ‘passing’ three quizzes of 70% plus, they can then move up to the next level, e.g. 4.3 to a 4.4. This is monitored closely by staff.
•Reading for pleasure books are the second choice. This is any book that the child would enjoy reading, this could be fiction or none fiction. For LKS2, these books often come from the local library on their four-weekly library visits.
Below are some key sources of support that parents can use to ensure that home learning most effectively reinforces school learning - because the way many adults learned to read is not how it is taught today! Most importantly, however, our door is always open at Mount Pleasant - so any questions, please just ask!
How we teach blending
Explanation of tricky words
Phase 2 sounds taught in Reception AUT 1
Phase 2 sounds taught in Reception AUT 2