Reading
Reading is a key skill that can open the doors to many other aspects of learning. At Moss Lane we want, and expect, all our children to enjoy stories, poetry and information gathering in non-fiction texts of all kinds so they become enthusiastic and able readers.
Research shows us that the single most significant indicator of economic success in adult life is the enjoyment of reading, not actually how hard the book you're reading is or how well you read it. Its that thirst for a book that counts.
To read well, and with enjoyment, children need a range of experiences, attitudes and skills. At Moss Lane we provide the best opportunities and teaching that will ensure our children become good readers. These include:
- Having fun with language, stories, poems and songs/rhymes by reading with/to children every day.
- Providing plenty of opportunity for children to enjoy and become familiar with different genres or types of stories.
- Helping children to listen well, to hear and discriminate between different sounds and to identify rhymes & alliteration.
- Providing a wide range of interesting books, texts and stories.
- Encouraging children to join in familiar parts of stories and to learn rhymes/poems.
- Supporting children to understand and use complex phrases and new vocabulary.
- Helping children to ask and answer questions about what they have read/heard.
- Showing how pictures in books give clues to the meaning of the text.
- Demonstrating and teaching how grammar and punctuation, the context within a sentence can help children to make good guesses at unfamiliar words.
- Teaching phonics so children can identify letters (graphemes) and the sounds they make (phonemes) to help them decode.
- Teaching children to recognise and recall, by sight, frequently used words that are not easy to decode using phonics (we call them ‘tricky’ words).
- Expecting families to support reading development by reading to and with their children for about 10 minutes five times a week.
- Create independence and a passion for reading by allowing children to choose the books they want to read, regardless of the reading ‘colour’ they are on.
Children will read every day in school. Sometimes just them and an adult, sometimes as part of a group and sometimes with the whole class. Reading is assessed regularly so that any child who is finding the process of learning to read more difficult than his/her peers can have additional support and those that are more confident can be challenged further.
To support our teaching of reading we use an extensive range of books from many reading schemes, as well as the Department of Education’s phonic programme ‘Letters and Sounds’ (see the link below) supported by Jolly Phonic resources.
All children will take home two reading books each day, one from the reading scheme (matched to their reading attainment) and one freely chosen by them from our school library, from the reading scheme or from the class library.
“By Year 2, pupils are keen readers. More-able pupils read avidly and are equally adept when reading for information or when reading stories”
- OFSTED Report Feb 2014
