Reading
Reading
At St Giles’ C of E Primary School, reading is at the heart of all learning. Developing reading skills and fluency allows children access to our broad and balanced curriculum. The early stages of reading allow children to have secure and embedded phonic knowledge to support them with sounding out unfamiliar words. As these skills develop, they will become fluent readers able to use their skills across the curriculum beginning a life- long love of reading. Children are encouraged to explore texts at depth, answering questions, giving opinions and showing a growing understanding of a wider vocabulary.
Our Reading Offer
Reading happens throughout the school day in most lessons, however a dedicated daily reading session is delivered every morning. Children have opportunities to read independently, individually and in Guided Reading groups.
Children have an individual reading book that is carefully matched to their reading level. Early readers have access to phonetically decodable books and work through the book banding system, ensuring that they are reading books to consolidate their phase in Letters and Sounds. They also have access to online books through our Bug Club Phonics resource.
As reading develops, children are exposed to texts with alternative spelling patterns and new vocabulary. In addition to this, children deepen their understanding by answering retrieval and inferential questions.
Reading and writing skills are taught using quality texts recommended by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), giving reading and writing real context for the children.
Our Reading Partnership
We recognise the valuable impact that reading at home can have. We encourage children to read every night as part of their homework and ask that reading diaries are signed.
School and community events such as Parent/Carer Letters and Sounds Workshops, The Book Bus, The Book Fair, sponsored readathons and ‘Drop Everything and Read’ promote a love for reading and provide parents with the tools to support reading at home. Please find further information below, including our whole school progression documents for Reading.
Phonics & Reading Schemes
At St Giles, we follow Phonics Bug as our scheme for phonics in EYFS and Year 1. Phonics Bug is fast-paced – children start to read after learning just eight phonemes – and combines fun 100% decodable books with BBC CBeebies video and whole-class teaching software to give you a range of aural, visual and kinaesthetic phonics activities to appeal to all the children in class.
We also use Bug Club as our main reading scheme and is supported by the online reading books. Bug Club is our reading program to help develop confident and motivated readers. It combines over 500 finely levelled books which are matched to the phonics the children are able to read, ensuring that our children are able to decode and read the books independently. These books are supplemented by reading books for parents to share with the children, ensuring they develop a love of books alongside the ability to read.