St Anne's Infants' School & Nursery Reach for the Stars
Being a reader
Why we teach reading
At St. Anne’s Infant School, reading is at the heart of everything we do. It is the key that unlocks children’s learning in all subject areas. Reading allows our children to escape into other worlds as well as giving them access to knowledge that broadens their world view and spiritual, moral, social and cultural awareness. Our principal aim is for all children to share our passion for reading for pleasure, for their enthusiasm for books to be ignited and for them to become, successful and capable, life-long readers.
The knowledge, skills and understanding children develop
Children learn to read through our approach of developing both language comprehension and word reading skills. In the Early Years Foundation Stage, children acquire the skills to communicate confidently and listen to and understand others in order to achieve the end of year Communication and Language Early Learning Goals. They develop phonics knowledge and gain a rich language and a wide vocabulary enabling them to understand text. We recognise that fluency and comprehension go hand in hand; we therefore model and teach fluency explicitly from the very first stages of reading and develop and build upon this in Key Stage 1, enabling them to achieve Age Related Expectations (ARE).
Children’s critical thinking skills are developed through in-depth analysis and comparisons of texts from different authors. By accessing a broad range of literature, children become adventurous readers with a willingness to increase their range of reading matter.
In both EYFS and Key Stage 1, children enjoy a range of high quality stories, non-fiction texts and poetry from around the world and are supported to engage in purposeful discussions.
The learning experience
From their first day at St Anne’s, children are surrounded by a print rich environment, which encourages a positive culture of reading throughout the school.
Children are immersed in engaging reading experiences where they gain meaning from texts and develop an enjoyment of books. Their imaginations are stimulated by being read aloud to in class and they are excited to take home bed-time story bags with their some of their personal favourites!
Our well-resourced, enticing library has a wealth of fiction and non-fiction books to choose from, including books that represent the diversity of the world's cultures. Children and their families are encouraged to visit the library to share and borrow books.
Children are provided with decodable reading books that are well-matched to their phonics knowledge. We work closely with parents and carers, sharing children’s reading successes as well as advice on how to support them further.
In collaborative, whole class reading sessions, children are explicitly taught strategies essential to becoming an independent and resilient reader.
Reading Books
Your child will bring home books specially selected to support their reading journey. Shortly after the children join us in Reception, they bring home a decodable shared reader. this contains the Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs)*, that the children have been learning in their phonics sessions. Phonics and shared reading lessons carry on into Year 1 and as such, children continue to bring home a phonics shared reading book weekly. Some children will continue with daily phonics lessons in Year 2.
When children are confident 'recognising and stretching'* to read most of the GPCs they have learnt, and can also read most red words (Common Exception Words*), they will begin to bring home a ‘reading for pleasure’ book, (these are identifiable by the coloured sticker and number on them). The point at which this will happen will be different for each child depending on their personal reading journey.
All children will bring home a library book which they have chosen in their fortnightly class library slot. Your child's class teacher will let you know when their library slot is so the book can be brought back and changed.
If you have any questions about reading books or the strategies used to support children's reading, please do not hesitate to contact your child's teacher who will be happy to help.
How you can help at home
Building confidence and fluency with reading takes lots of practice. At St Anne's we are committed to supporting your child's reading progress and will hear them read as a whole class, in groups and one-to-one whenever possible. We ask that parents echo this support at home by encouraging and listening to their child read at least 3 times a week. Often this can be best in the morning or at weekends when your child is feeling less tired. Recording your child's reading in their blue reading record is really key to sharing information between parents and teachers.
Our 'reading strategy checklist' poster can be found below. This checklist provides helpful strategies and prompts to support your child when hearing them read with a view to developing their independence.
If you are concerned about your child's reading or feel you need support in developing reading habits at home, please speak to your child's class teacher in the first instance.
*Grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) is the relationship between a phoneme (unit of sound e.g. sss) and its graphemes (or symbols e.g. the letter /s/). We use the terminology GPC with children from Reception.
Learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences helps children to stretch and read a word.
For example:
c-ar-p-e-t
car-pet
carpet
*Common Exception Words- words that appear regularly in both written and spoken language but do not follow standard spelling rules, e.g. the, are, come
Reading Spine
A love of literature is woven throughout all elements of literacy at St Anne's. We have a reading spine inspired by prominent authors and literacy experts that helps shape the stories and texts we share with the children. On a daily basis, children are read a class story that is taken from the year groups' reading spine. These books are voted each term to allow all children to have ownership over the texts that they hear. Our reading spine also plays a vital part in our teaching of writing, whereby most of our daily writing lessons are underpinned by a key text.