Reading
Our aims for our pupils
Click to enlarge our ‘successful pupil’ posters:
‘Going for Gold’ Reading Challenges!
Repeated Reads and Talk Through Stories
In Reception, Year 1, Year 2 & Year 3, each class has a ‘super selection’. These are high-quality texts that have been carefully chosen as repeated texts. These books are displayed on separate shelving within the classroom and children will read them again and again throughout the year. We love our Repeated Reads!
Talk Through Stories is a teaching strategy we use at Bowling Green Academy to extend and deepen children’s comprehension and vocabulary in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2.
In Story week, we help children to get to know the story well: the plot, the characters, and their actions and motives.
In Vocabulary week, we focus on eight words from the story. These are words that children are unlikely to hear in everyday conversation but are likely to come across in stories. For example, in I’m In Charge by Jeanne Willis, we chose bellowed, startled, barged, sneaked, grinned, dreadful, stomped, refused.
Children’s understanding of each word is then developed in the context of their everyday lives.
Recommended Reads
Our parents/ carers often ask us to recommend books to read at home. The below posters are suggestions for each year group across different text genres.
Phonics and Early Reading
At Bowling Green Academy we use Read Write Inc. as our Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme. This programme is followed with rigor and fidelity by all teachers and teaching assistants. Discrete whole-class phonics lessons are taught to all children, daily in Year’s 1, 2 and Reception. To ensure that learning is embedded, flashcards and reading opportunities continue throughout the day and additional phonics teaching is given to identified children. Phonics remains the main strategy that we use to approach/decode unfamiliar words and spelling across the school. We believe we can teach all children to read and that all children can love reading..
Children working within the Read Write Inc. stages have their reading books selected by the class teachers and teaching assistants to match the sounds that they are currently working on or need to practice. This way the books become a focused tool to support progress.
Individual phonics assessments are completed for all children working within Read Write Inc. every half term (sometimes more frequently). Teachers then use this information to support pupils in moving forwards. Continuous formative assessment is carried out during lessons and this is used to inform any same day intervention or catch up.
Children who have been identified as ‘working below the required standard’ should have daily intervention until back on track. We continue to use Read Write Inc. structures and processes for intervention.
Guided Reading
Once children have reached a proficient level in phonics, they graduate onto whole-class guided reading lessons. Reading material is taken from a variety of sources ensuring texts are engaging and challenging; enthuse the children to widen their reading repertoire; often linking to a previous topic taught in the wider curriculum; linking to current affairs or be about a current news topic or a common celebration (e.g. Black History Month).
Guided reading follows a four-day structure – with additional reference to reading skills (e.g. inference, prediction, summarising), vocabulary and fluency.
