Reading at Arbouthorne Community Primary School
How Do Our Pupils Learn to Read?
Our approach to reading is developed through the following aspects
- Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) Little Wandle Letters and Sounds (Revised)
- Reading for pleasure and enjoyment
- Independent reading
- Shared reading
- Guided Reading
- Reading practise sessions
- Accelerated Reader for children who have passed their Phonics Screening Test
- Celebrating achievement and effort with books
- Author visits
- Online author chats
- Popular culture - choosing texts that children love for them to read
- Cutting Edge - finding out about up and coming children's authors to share with children
- Understanding barriers to learning and overcoming them
An ability to read phonetically and to secure a love of reading within a rich curriculum is a prime focus. Specific skills led learning takes place alongside targeted intervention.
Learning to Read
Oracy
On entry to our school (2025), only 2% of children achieve above the 50th centile on BPVS tracking (British Picture Vocabulary Scale), 31% of children join our school at the first centile. This data shows a declining picture on entry over time, from 38% in 2008/9 and as a result, language delay experienced by many of our pupils is our very early key driver to accelerate progress from these significantly low starting points. Oracy and language acquisition is our main focus in Foundation Stage 1, with a crucial focus on phonics and reading in Foundation Stage 2 and Year 1. Maximising progress of pupils in these early years enables pupils to apply their phonic knowledge and understanding of language into their writing.
Teaching and learning of oracy is categorised into 4 categories: cognitive, linguistic, physical and social.
Embedding planned talk in every lesson across the curriculum is key and an expectation.
- Teachers plan for a variety of different types of talk on the continuum of exploratory to presentational talk.
- Voice 21 resources support the rigorous planning of talk to include purpose, structure, scaffolds and reflection.
- Groupings, space, protocol and roles are planned so that children have a scaffold to ‘hang their learning on’ such as providing question prompts and sentence starters, modelling expected responses and celebrating children’s successes. ‘Kagan Structures’ are planned for and used to structure talk sessions.
- Tower Hamlets sentence stems are displayed in classrooms to support teaching and learning.
- Colleagues use the ‘Birmingham Toolkit Speaking and Listening’ assessment to support their universal and targeted offer for pupils
Pupils progress in oracy is monitored and assessed through:
- Group discussion and interaction
- Grammar and sentence building
- Listening and understanding
- Verbal storytelling and narrative
- Vocabulary
- Clarity of speech
Phonics
A robust and consistent approach to phonics teaching through a systematic synthetic phonics programme, teaches children how to segment and blend words, recognise tricky words and apply taught skills. This allows children to independently read fully decodable text and for most children this starts within FS2. Children engage and develop rapidly with the programme. Some children need further support after each teaching session and we run targeted and comprehensive 'keep up' sessions.
Phonically decodable texts, aligned to the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds (Revised 2021) programme, are used sequentially in the early stages of reading and for some learners beyond FS2 and Y1 as they continue learning to read in other year groups. We send home your child's phonically decodable book to read with you once they have shared this at least three times with the teacher in a small group, these books are also available on the ECollins Hub for which your child has their own login. This supports children's fluency and application and secures the letters and sounds that have been taught. Children will also choose a book of interest which they can share with you. This may be from the classroom or our library and these are books you will read to your child whilst discussing the storyline, characters or content.
All pupils in Foundation Stage 2 and Year 1 take part in daily phonics teaching sessions. Children who did not achieve a 'pass' in the Y1 phonics screening check receive daily targeted phonics interventions, progress is monitored rigorously so that gaps are closed.
Which graphemes do children learn when in Reception and Year 1?
Once pupils can decode...
Once children are secure with being able to automatically blend phase 5 sounds, they have the building blocks to be able to decode text. Children take part in weekly guided reading sessions. Children will continue to learn to read more complex texts with a focus on comprehension skills.
Shared Reading: explicit reading instruction teaching/ applying comprehension skills and application of phonic skills/ vocabulary development, language acquisition and fluency/ intonation/rhythm) expression.
Reading Practice: teacher- led guided reading session at instructional level.
Reading Fluency: teacher-led sessions to increase pupils’ ability to read a text accurately, quickly and with expression. Reading fluency provides a bridge between word recognition and comprehension.
Accelerated Reader: a digital whole-class reading management and monitoring programme that aims to foster independent reading. At this stage instruction begins to focus in greater depth on language comprehension processes, as vocabulary, complex sentence constructions and narrative structures place greater demands upon reading comprehension. Children not making expected progress participate in more frequent teacher led guided groups to accelerate progress.
What do we mean by 'Reading for Pleasure'?
Children in every class have timetabled opportunities to read for pleasure in school. We enjoy finding newly published books that interest and motivate our children, keep abreast with the latest quality literature and generate a culture of joy in exploring new and classic literature, comics, publications, e-books (through our Accelerated Reader programme) and our children keep colleagues at the cutting edge of popular culture!
Reading for pleasure:
- At its core is the reader's volition, their agency and desire to read, and anticipation of the satisfaction gained through the experience and/ or afterwards in interaction with others.
- It is or can be transformational (Cremin et al 2014:5)
- It can involve any type of text: novel, comic, magazine, non-fiction text,
- It can be on or offline and includes reading aloud or being read to
- It can take place anywhere: at home, school, on a bus, in a park,
- It can be solitary and social and interactive
Colleagues use children’s voice frequently to engage with current interests, opinions and habits around reading which impacts positively on the book stock available to pupils, the discussions that take place around reading for pleasure and the engagement of families in their child’s reading habits. We take part in reading books from various categories of Sheffield Children's Book Awards and voting for our favourites. We love to watch the awards ceremony each year in Sheffield Theatres and regularly take our pupils to the local library.
Power of Reading
We are a Power of Reading School and draw upon the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) resources and training which ensures we have the latest literature in the classroom. High quality texts are shared with the children and promoted throughout school, so that children engage with excellent books. Click here for CLPE website
