Strategies for the teaching of reading at Our Lady of Mount Carmel RC Primary School
Intent
At Our Lady of Mount Carmel RC Primary School, we believe that reading is an essential life skill and we are committed to enabling our children to become lifelong readers. Our Reading Leads are Mr Docherty and Miss C Bostock.
At the heart of our strategy is our drive to foster a love of reading, enriching children’s learning through carefully designed teaching activities that utilise imaginative stories and thought provoking texts.
Reading is a skill that enables children to develop their learning across the wider curriculum and lays the foundations for success in future lines of study and employment. We recognise the importance of taking a consistent whole school approach to the teaching of reading in order to close any gaps and to target the highest possible number of children attaining the expected standard or higher.
We have high expectations of all children and we encourage children to challenge themselves, persevere and pursue success, always ‘reaching for the stars’
Spoken language underpins all seven areas of learning and development in the revised 2021 Early Learning Goals. The aim is to reduce the language gap between children from language-rich homes and those who are not.
These three things make the biggest difference to reduce the language gap:
- Reading aloud
- Teaching children poems and songs
- Talking with children
Nursery
- Daily story/Nursery Rhymes
- Phase One phonic activities- Encouraging the children to play with soundsand listen out for all the different sounds around them, to help them tune in to their new word sounds.
- Developing the ability to hear all the different sounds in a word – for instance, knowing that a word like ‘dog’ is made up of three sounds, ‘d’, ‘o’ and ‘g’
- Sound and listening games
- Making sounds: silly or sensible, loud or soft, and getting the children to copy it. Then children make a sound for you to copy too.
- Environmental sounds –Playing with the sounds around us. Listening walks to see how many different sounds you can hear: cars, footsteps, birdsong, the wind in the trees, and so on. Give the children a point for each sound they hear – and an extra point if they can copy it!
- Having fun with animal noises. Can the children make the right noise when you say an animal name (cow, duck, elephant . . .)?
- Rhyme time- hearing and copying rhymes
- Saying simple one-syllable words, like ‘pat’, and ask the children to say a word that rhymes with it. It doesn’t matter if this is a real word (like ‘bat’) or a made-up one (like ‘dat’) – the important thing is that they’ve heard and copied the rhyme.
- Say the children’s names (or a favourite toy’s name, or a friend’s name) and see how many rhyming words they can think of.
- Sing or say some rhyming songs, nursery rhymes or poems together. Pause at the end of a rhyming line and let your child add the rhyming word (‘Twinkle, twinkle little star, How I wonder what you . . .’).
- Acting like a reader-When they share a book with you, model some of the skills they’ll need when they start reading.
- Point to the words as you read. This helps the children to spot that words are made up of groups of letters, and that words go from left to right and from top to bottom on the page. As they get more experienced, you could ask them to have a go at pointing under the words as you read.
- Use words like ‘cover’, ‘page’, ‘picture’ and ‘words’ when you talk about books, and praise your child for using those words appropriately too.
- Let your child find the first page of the story before you start reading, and encourage them to turn the pages as you read.
- Starbooks- encourage parents into the classroom to model reading with their child.
- When your child is choosing a book to read, help them by reading the back cover and talking about the story and the cover pictures together.
- Talk about books as you read – discuss with the children what you think about the story (or the information in a non-fiction book) and encourage them to tell you their ideas too. ‘I wonder what’s going to happen next?
- Encourage the children to talk about their own experiences when reading aloud.
- RWInc Set 1 sounds- introduce Summer term
Reception
- Voting for a daily story
- Teaching Set 1 sounds
- Word time lessons
- Blending
- Tricky words
- Sight reading
- Set 2 sounds (special friends)
- Pre-ditty books
- Picture books
- Blending books
- RWI books
Key Stage 1
Set2/3 sounds with RWI
- Pre-ditty assessed through RWI and pupils grouped accordingly
- Guided reading partners- reading in pairs and modelled by teacher
- Weekly comprehension
- Special friends/Fred Talk
- Catch up sessions
- RWI reading scheme until grey group
- Common exception words
- Class novels- whole class reading
Key Stage 2
We follow a Mastery approach to English through the programme Pathways to Read. Units of work are delivered using high quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities for reading. Skills are built up through repetition within the units, and children apply these skills in the reading activities provided. We deliver one whole class shared reading lesson per week from years 2-6 with bespoke grouped reading for every pupil at least once a week as well as individual reading. For pupils still needing support with phonics from years 2-6, we provide an individual reading programme that has phonically decodable texts at the heart of it. In our shared and grouped reads, there is a clear teaching focus with the opportunity to master key reading skills in each session. There are follow on reading tasks to enable pupils to evidence the skills they have mastered independently. Many opportunities for widening children’s vocabulary are given through the Pathways to Read approach and this builds on the extensive work we do in school to provide our children with a rich and varied vocabulary.
We also use Pathways to Write to drive our writing curriculum. This aligns with Pathways to Read ensuring meaningful links for our pupils with texts and topics that are used across Literacy, Humanities and Science.