Reading Practice Sessions

Children in Reception, Year 1 and 2, read fully matched decodable books with an adult 3 times per week during our ‘Reading Practice’ sessions. These sessions are 15 minutes long. The books are then sent home for children to build their reading fluency and showcase their developing skills and phonetic knowledge to their parents/carers. These 3 reading practice sessions each have a different focus; decoding, prosody and comprehension.

Our reading books in Reception, Y1 and Y2: Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Big Cat books; including both fiction and non-fiction texts. Each week, the children take home a decodable reading book alongside a ‘reading for pleasure’ book to develop their love of reading.

Reading for Pleasure

Reading and books develop a child’s imagination, deepen their receptive and expressive vocabulary and help children to understand the world they live in; that is why we believe reading for pleasure is vital. Our aim is for all children to develop a life-long love of reading. Reading for Pleasure remains a whole school priority. Reading enjoyment has been reported as more important for children’s educational success than their family’s socio-economic status (OECD, 2002). We believe that a whole school Reading for Pleasure culture must be planned for and promoted throughout the school in a variety of ways, ensuring that all children have the opportunity to develop that real love of reading.

Every day the teachers read aloud a class book to the children, that the children have voted for in the morning. There is a focus on fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts and these texts are chosen carefully so there is a range of high quality, diverse texts to engage the children and appeal to a range of children. We continue the love of story in Reception by sharing high-quality texts daily as a class and revisiting them to acquire more vocabulary and become confident in storytelling. We actively promote times when children can talk about their personal experiences and the frequent birthday book gifts ensure that books maintain a high profile.

Throughout our environment, children have opportunities to read independently during morning and afternoon registration times. During child led learning time, the children can select texts independently from reading corners to continue to develop their love of stories. This time is also used so that class teachers can listen to children read on a one-to-one basis and offer individualised feedback. Clear strengths and next steps are highlighted to parents in reading journals and feedback from parents is responded to so that there is a strong communication between home and school. Our book corners are calming, engaging spaces with a number of high-quality texts that children are able to borrow and share.