Reading

At Golden Valley, we want our pupils to develop a life-long love of books by exposing them to a range of authors and high quality texts. We aim for all children to become fluent readers with a love of reading. Through the high quality teaching of phonics and reading skills, they will be able to develop their knowledge of the world in which they live.

We have embedded a strong reading culture across the school and an environment in which reading is valued and championed.

The Enjoyment of Reading

At Golden Valley we take every opportunity to promote and celebrate reading. We have carefully chosen the books for each of our classroom libraries and the teachers can talk with knowledge and enthusiasm about the selection. This allows each teacher to understand every child in their care as a reader and guide them to select suitable texts to support their reading journey. Our school library is well stocked with non-fiction books which are borrowed by the children to supplement the classroom libraries. These are chosen to suit the children’s interests and to link to our units of work in history, geography and science as well as ensuring that the children are exposed to a diversity of cultures.

Reading for Pleasure sessions are built in each week to allow children to share books with a friend. Within these sessions, children may choose to read picture books, poetry, plays, newspapers and non-fiction books for example.

This is a useful website to support reading at home;

https://ourfp.org/supporting-rah/

Providing children with a rich diet of literature is important to us so teachers read aloud to children at least once each day from carefully chosen class novels, poetry or picture books. The books that teachers read aloud may be key texts for our writing outcomes or chosen to enrich learning in history or geography.

At Golden Valley, we take every opportunity to celebrate reading: we hold two book fairs each year, Celebrate World Book Day, promote the Library Summer Reading Scheme, take part in voting panels for National Book Awards and run a children’s book group. We have also hosted several author visits to inspire the children in their reading choices. There is a Year 6 Book group where children have the opportunity to read and discuss more challenging texts. In addition to this, there are opportunities to read and vote on books that have been shortlisted for National Awards.

Fluency

The journey to becoming a fluent reader begins in Reception when children develop their phonic skills through the daily delivery of Unlocking Letters and Sounds. Once children are able to access a book, they have weekly guided reading sessions with carefully matched, phonically decodable books.

These books are read several times to develop fluency and understanding. Once the children are secure in their decoding, are reading with automaticity and show understanding of the text, they will move to the next stage. Reading at home allows the children to further practice what they have learnt from the teaching sessions. The books that children take home are closely matched to their phonetic knowledge and de-coding skills.

Teachers closely monitor the children’s progress in reading fluency and targeted intervention sessions are put in place to secure decoding and fluency skills for those children that may be falling behind.

In Key Stage Two, we continue to provide opportunities for children to develop their fluency skills by providing increasingly challenging texts.  Those children who have not fully mastered fluency have weekly fluency group sessions with books carefully matched to their reading ability. These sessions focus on reading accurately, with expression and understanding. The teacher uses a variety of strategies to model and support this process. Regular phonics teaching sessions are also put in place for those children are not secure in their decoding skills.

Reading at home is monitored weekly and children who need extra practice read to an adult in school as part of a ‘Regular Readers’ programme.

Comprehension

Decoding with accuracy and reading with automaticity is key to children understanding what they are reading. The explicit teaching of vocabulary enables children to have the skills that they need to understand the words in the context of the text that they are reading or listening to.

Comprehension is taught both through book talk around the class novels and key texts as well as through the reading that children do connected to history, geography and science units of work.

In Reception and Year 1 children are encouraged to develop their comprehension skills and to retell and make predictions. As the children reach Year 2, in addition to group guided reading session, whole class reading sessions are introduced to explicitly teach comprehension skills.

In Key Stage Two whole class guided reading sessions are used to develop children’s written responses to texts. These could be whole texts or extracts and are carefully chosen to ensure progression throughout the school. Pre-reading sessions are used to ensure that children who may struggle with the level of challenge involved in the reading, have the opportunity to practise and develop their understanding before the whole class session. As in Key Stage 1, book talk and expert questioning during the reading of key texts or class novel is used to develop comprehension skills.

Phonics and Early Reading

Phonics Scheme

We use Unlocking Letters and Sounds which was validated by the DfE in December 2021.

We begin teaching phonics in the first few weeks of term 1 in Reception and children make rapid progress in their reading journey. Children begin to learn the main sounds heard in the English Language and how they can be represented, as well as learning ‘Common Exception’ words for phases 2, 3 and 4. They use these sounds to read and write simple words, captions and sentences. Children leave Reception able to apply the phonemes taught within phase 2, 3 and 4.

Click here to see the Unlocking Letters and Sounds Phase 2 ‘Actions, Images and Letter Formation’ document.

Click here to see the Unlocking Letters and Sounds Phase 3 ‘Actions, Images and Letter Formation’ document.

In Year 1, through phase 5a, b and c, children learn alternative spellings and pronunciations as well as additional Common Exception Words. By the end of Year 1 children will have mastered using phonics to decode and blend when reading and segment when spelling. In Year 1, all children are screened using the Phonics Screening Check.

In Year 2, phonics continues to be revisited to ensure mastery of the phonetic code and any child who does not meet age related expectations will continue to receive support to close identified gaps.

Click here to see the Unlocking Letters and Sounds ‘Overview Progression’ document.

To ensure no child is left behind at any point in the progression, children are regularly assessed and supported to keep up through bespoke 1-1 interventions. These include GPC recognition and blending and segmenting interventions. Pupils’ progress is closely monitored to ensure these interventions have impact.

Reading Scheme

At Golden Valley, we promote a ‘phonics first’ approach and in both our guided reading sessions at school and in the books children take home, texts are very closely matched to a child’s current phonics knowledge so that every child can experience real success in their reading.

In these crucial early stages of reading, we primarily use books from Ransom Reading Stars Phonics to ensure complete fidelity to the Unlocking Letters and Sounds progression we follow.

Once children progress beyond decodable texts, they move onto our book scheme so that they can continue to progress their decoding, fluency and comprehension skills to become avid, expert readers.