Reading

Reading Curriculum Intent

At Wincobank Nursery Infants School, Reading and the teaching of Reading is the foundation of our creative curriculum. Our aim is for all children to become confident, fluent, lifelong readers so that they can access the full curriculum offer. Teaching children to read confidently, for information and for pleasure is the most important thing that we do.

The reading curriculum that is driven by high quality diverse texts and progressively builds knowledge, understanding and skills. Strong links are made across all curriculum areas to ensure knowledge does not sit in isolation. Meaningful links with other subjects are made to strengthen connections, enable a deeper understanding of vocabulary and allow opportunities for our pupils to transfer knowledge and language across curriculum areas, thus enhancing communication, language and literacy across the curriculum.

Our ambitious and bespoke Reading curriculum focuses on and consists of three dimensions:

word reading

Skilled word reading involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. Underpinning both is the understanding that the letters on the page represent the sounds in spoken words.

comprehension (both listening and reading)

Good comprehension draws from linguistic knowledge (in particular of vocabulary and grammar) and on knowledge of the world. Comprehension skills develop through pupils’ experience of high-quality discussion with the teacher, as well as from reading and discussing a range of stories, poems and non-fiction.

Reading for Pleasure

Reading gives children access to knowledge and feeds pupils’ imagination, opening up a treasure house of wonder and joy for curious young minds.

A series of carefully chosen texts from Nursery to Y2 form the basis of our curriculum delivery and an exciting reading journey for children. These texts include a range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry books. Trips, visitors and memorable experiences are carefully planned across all curriculum subjects to support the background knowledge and vocabulary our children need to support their reading comprehension and vocabulary. Vocabulary and knowledge are both taught explicitly within our reading lessons.

Early Reading

Our skilled pre-school staff in Ducklings 1 use Stories for Talking as a vehicle for teaching our youngest children, who quickly develop a love of books and begin to retell their favourite familiar stories and apply the vocabulary in their own talk.

As soon as children enter nursery ‘Ducklings 2’ they begin learn the pre-requisite skills to reading through phase 1 Letters and Sounds. Listening to, making and recognising sounds through fun activities and games. They continue to enjoy focus stories from our Reading Spine and sharing books with their friends.

Read Write Inc

At Wincobank Nursery Infants School we use the Read Write Inc (RWI) programme to get children off to a flying start with their phonics and reading. RWI is a method of learning centred around letter sounds and phonics, and we use it to aid children in their early reading and writing.

Using RWI, the children learn to read effortlessly so that they can put all their energy into comprehending what they read. When using RWI to read the children will:

learn 44 sounds and the corresponding letter/letter groups using simple picture prompts
learn to read words using Fred Talk
read lively stories featuring words they have learned to sound out
show that they comprehend the stories by answering questions.
When using RWI to write the children will:
learn to write the letters/letter groups which represent 44 sounds.
learn to write words by saying the sounds in Fred Talk
write simple sentences
The Read Write Inc Website has some great tutorial videos to help you understand how Read Write Inc works and how you can support your child at home:
formation Page

In year 2 our children move from learning to read to reading to learn through the excellent RWI comprehension scheme. This consists of a series of individual workbooks which children work through systematically with their teacher learning the skills of reading comprehension completing all aspects of the reading programme of study for KS1 and beyond.

Reading Assessments

There are National Assessments in Year 1 and Year 2

In Year 1 your child will sit a phonics assessment to identify which phonic patterns your child can recognise and read. This involves reading real and alien words. The results of this test will be reported in your child's end of year report.

In Year 2 your child will have their first SATs assessment. The tests in Year 2 consist of a set of assessments conducted by your child’s class teacher along with two reading papers.

We assess children's phonics skills each half term from the beginning of reception tracking their progress and putting in place support children need to make expected progress. We informally assess children’s reading on a daily basis ensuring they are given the correct texts and teaching. We formally assess reading each term from the summer term in reception putting into place reading interventions for any child who falls behind and identifying gaps and next steps for the teaching of reading for each group of children.

Story Time

Reading aloud is the most important thing that we do and is a frequent and regular part of each school day. It slows written language down and enables children to hear and take in tunes and patterns. During this protected time, our children experience and enjoy stories that they might not otherwise meet. During this time we share the reading with the children so they can tackle texts which are harder than they can read alone..

Home Reading

At school, we encourage your child to read a range of books and talk about the books they read. Both our reading scheme and class libraries provide children with a wealth of texts in different forms, E.g newspapers, magazines, non-fiction books, modern fiction, poetry and key classics. We encourage our children read their home reading books every day and these are discussed and changed regularly by the class teacher and Teaching Assistant. Whilst they are on the RWI scheme children will be provided with a text they can read themselves matched to their phonic skills and a real book that you can read to them from the school library.

In class children love to recommend books they have shared at home to their friends, which is all part of our relentless drive to building a strong reading culture.

Celebrating Reading

As a school, we want our children to leave us with a thirst for knowledge and a love of literature and reading. We place a large focus on reading for enjoyment, and children throughout the school regularly participate in a variety of engaging and inspiring reading activities both in and outside of school.

What better way to encourage reading for pleasure in our school than by having a top-quality author to motivate our students about the joy of reading or a whole school story event?

Celebrating National events like world poetry day and World book day are always on our events calendar.