Oakwood Avenue Community Primary School

The Teaching of Reading

• It is our aim to develop enthusiastic and confident readers who can understand a wide range of texts.
• Children will read for interest, information and enjoyment when accessing all areas of the curriculum

Children need to have a good understanding of language and be able to recognise words in order to read well.

One strategy for learning to read is the use of phonics. Children in EYFS and KS1 follow Letters and Sounds, a systematic structured phonics programme, which enables them to sound out and blend words after learning just a few letters. Letters and Sounds is taught in small groups throughout Foundation Stage and Key Stage1. Weekly phonics homework is set to support children’s learning.  All children in Year 1 in England must sit a Phonics Screening Check to assess their progress and children who do not yet meet the required standard will be given extra support. A workshop for the parents of children in Year 1 is held each year so that parents can find out more about the teaching of phonics and the screening check.

With repeated exposure to words, the children learn to recognise them automatically and their reading will become more phrased and fluent. Through shared reading (whole class), guided reading (small groups) and individual reading, your child will learn the skills necessary to read and understand books - using phonics while applying their knowledge of the meaning and structure of texts to read the books, while developing a range of skills to enable them to understand, engage and respond to texts.

Parental support is extremely important as children learn to read, so we ask parents to read each evening with their children. In Reception and Year 1, your child will also bring home ‘rocket words’ which are words their teacher would like them to practise so that they can be recognised and read automatically. Throughout the school, it is very important that children not only read regularly but also develop their vocabulary and talk about the books they have read.

We use a range of reading schemes within the school as we believe that breadth of reading is important. In the earlier stages, the books are banded according to difficulty. Some of the reading schemes we use are Oxford Reading Tree, Rigby, Collins Big Cat, Project X and Bug Club.

If you would like more ideas about how you can help your child, then please see your child’s teacher in the first instance.

Weblinks:

Free interactive book apps for early readers are available Search the itunes app store for ‘Collins Big Cat’ and there are a few books available.