Reading Intent

Our curriculum promotes reading for pleasure and we aspire for all to children to develop a habit of reading widely and often. High quality texts that inspire reading and writing are at the core of our English curriculum. This means that, by the time our children leave Year 6, they will have been immersed in a wide and diverse range of excellent children’s literature. We believe that Read, Write, Inc. (RWI) phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. Children learn to read fluently and at speed so they can focus on developing their skills in comprehension, vocabulary and spelling. The teaching of phonics is of high priority.

Early Reading

Reading and phonics

Learning to read is the most important thing your child will learn at our school. Everything else depends on it, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible.

What is phonics?

Phonics is the method of teaching reading through the identification of sounds and graphemes. All words are made up of individual sounds and these sounds are blended together to form words. A grapheme is another name for the letters we use to write the sounds - the spelling of that sound on the page. The National Curriculum requires that all children are taught phonics systematically through a program, giving children to tools to read and write any word. At Greville, the program we have chosen is Read Write Inc.

Early reading

Under Read Write Inc, the children are taught a new sound each day. They practise using this sound to read both real and alien words, and to use it in their writing. They read books with this sound in, and revisit it frequently so that it is kept in their long term memory.

The children are assessed each half term, and then placed into groups depending on what they need to learn next. Thanks to our fantastic teaching assistants, we are able to cover a wide range of groups. Each reading teacher is highly trained to deliver the sessions, and Read Write Inc has a culture of constant training and practise so that the teaching standard remains high.

For more information about Read Write Inc, please visit: https://www.ruthmiskin.com/parents/ 

Reading at Home

Please see below for a copy of the presentation from our most recent parent workshop for YR and Y1 parents about early reading.

LOVE OF READING

We want your child to love reading – and to want to read for themselves. This is why we put our efforts into making sure they develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read.

Stories are a key pillar of learning in Reception and Year 1. Children enjoy getting to know a carefully selected range of high quality stories at school. Some are limited to learning across the curriculum and others are shared for pure engagement, allowing even the youngest children at The Greville to know the delights of being ‘lost’ in a book.

Accelerated Reader  

From years 3 – 6, children at the Greville are transitioned onto Accelerated Reader when they are ready. Children who have reached the end of Read Write Inc Phonics, are assessed using the Star Reader, which carefully matches them to the appropriate Accelerated Reader level (their ZPD). Children are then free to choose their reading book from a range of books at their level. We have a fantastic library for children to choose their books from, as well as small year group libraries in Years 3 and 4. Children are able to take ‘quizzes’ on the book they have just read and are assessed at four points in the year to ensure they are reading the correct books. Daily, independent reading is a key part of Accelerated Reader and children have time daily to read independently in class.         

Whole Class Reading

Our Greville Whole Class reading curriculum is carefully aligned with our writing curriculum, exposing children to a wide range of texts and genres. We use VIPERS (an acronym to aid the recall of the 6 reading domains as part of the reading curriculum) to aid our planning. This ensures children know the key areas which we feel they need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts. You can see the texts we study on our curriculum maps and year group pages.

VIPERS stands for

Vocabulary

Inference

Prediction

Explanation

Retrieval

Sequence or Summarise

The 6 domains focus on the comprehension aspect of reading and not the mechanics: decoding, fluency, prosody etc.  As such, VIPERS is not a reading scheme but rather a method of ensuring that teachers ask, and students are familiar with, a range of questions.  They allow the teacher to track the type of questions asked and the children’s responses to these which allows for targeted questioning afterwards.

Impact

As we believe that reading is key to all learning, the impact of our reading curriculum goes beyond the result of statutory assessments. As a Year 6 reader, transitioning into secondary school, we aspire that children are fluent, confident and able readers, who can access a range of texts for pleasure and enjoyment, as well as use their reading skills to unlock learning and all areas of the curriculum.