Reading
Teaching of Reading in Foundation and Year 1:
Little Wandle Books
Reception and Year 1 children have 3 reading sessions a week, following the Little Wandle reading programme. Weekly, teachers in Reception and KS1 will group children and allocate a book for the week. Teachers will use the allocated Little Wandle grid to map their children and the allocated books. Teachers will take guidance from the regular assessments to which books children should be reading. After 3 reading sessions, the book will go home on Friday for a ‘show off’ read, the book will be returned by parents on the Monday morning.
Teaching of Reading Year 2 and KS2:
Big Cat Books
By the end of year 1, most children will have graduated from phonics and will move from Little Wandle Phonics Books to Big Cat Books. These progressive books are available in the turquoise, purple, gold, white and lime, copper, topaz, ruby, emerald, sapphire, diamond, pearl bands. Children that need extra support within reading will become a daily reader in class to ensure they are making as much progress as possible. Children will take these books home to read to parents. Assessments will take place at the end of each half term, ensuring children’s reading ability are matched carefully to their book.
Teaching of Reading Year 2 and KS2
Complete Comprehension
To support the teaching of reading we also use Complete Comprehension for years 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Each child that has graduated phonics will complete a mixture of adult-led and independent sessions, four sessions a week. This scheme focusing on the key comprehension skills: word meaning, retrieval, summarising, inference, prediction, relationship, word choice and comparison.
Session 1: Whole class read – control the game. Each child takes in turn to read. This gives the children an opportunity to understand a new text.
Session 2: Whole class read – control the game. Each child takes in turn to read. This gives the children an opportunity to revisit the text. The teacher will ask comprehension questions as the children are reading.
Session 3: Children will be given some independent time to read the text. Teachers will present the model questions to the children, as a class the questions will be answered. Modelling by the teacher, how to find the answers.
Session 4: Children will answer the independent questions.
Great books build the imagination. The more we read aloud expressively, and the more children can savour, discuss and reinterpret literature through the arts, the more memorable the characters, places and events become, building an inner world. A child who is read to will have an inner kingdom of unicorns, talking spiders and a knife that cuts into other worlds. The mind is like a ‘tardis’; it may seem small but inside there are many mansions. Each great book develops the imagination and equips the reader with language. (Pie Corbett, 2020)
At St. David’s whole class reading takes place at the end of every day, for 20 mins when the class teacher reads a high-quality text to the class.
Thought-provoking texts have been carefully planned for each class, each half term. The purpose of these texts are that they are pitched HIGHER than your child's reading level and that your child would not be able to access them efficiently unless a staff member was reading it to them.
Ventrus MAT
Ventrus (formerly The Primary Academies Trust) was set up in 2011 by a group of like minded headteachers who wanted to build a stable and secure platform from which they could grow a network of excellent schools.
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