Reading at Albrighton

                         How do we teach reading at Albrighton Primary School and Nursery?

At Albrighton, reading is of paramount importance. Our staff are committed to ensuring that pupils have a passion for reading and become confident, capable readers. Our staff are all trained to a high standard to deliver phonics and reading lessons. We are ambitious for our pupils and are determined that all children will learn to read well. Our Reading curriculum has been carefully planned so that phonics teaching is pacey and progressive, pupils build on the sounds they know and have plenty of opportunity to practise new sounds. Once pupils are confident blending sounds, we develop their fluency and stamina whilst ensuring they have a deep understanding of the text. The impact of our progressive and effective reading curriculum is that we develop children who read confidently, talk about books, access the full wider curriculum and become life-long independent readers.

Mrs Short

English Lead 

 

Intent

At Albrighton Primary School we believe that reading is an essential life skill for all children, therefore, we are committed to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers. Our reading curriculum ensures children develop the knowledge and skills necessary to be fluent readers, who enjoy reading both for pleasure and knowledge. Our reading curriculum has been designed to foster a love of reading which also enriches children’s learning through carefully designed teaching activities that utilise high quality texts.

Reading is a skill that enables children to develop their learning across the wider curriculum and lays the foundations for success in future study and employment. We take a consistent approach to the teaching of reading across school in both phonics, 1:1 reading and in guided reading sessions to close any gaps and to target the highest possible number of children attaining the expected standard or higher whilst ensuring every child fulfils their potential. 

 

Our READ4s

Read 4 Fluency

Read 4 Pleasure

Read 4 Knowledge

Read 4 Inspiration

 

Implementation 

We believe at Albrighton that the teaching of Phonics should be adult led, with multi-sensory, hands on, engaging activities within a teaching structure that ensures children are engaged and enthused to want to read and learn more.

We teach phonics and early reading using the new updated FFT’s Success for All Phonics programme, which is a complete Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) programme validated by the DfE. FFT’s Success for All Phonics gives children a daily phonics and reading lessons from EYFS to the end of Year 1. The daily lessons cover all the main Grapheme–Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs) and Common Exception Words to provide children with the phonic knowledge and skills required for success in becoming a fluent and accurate reader by the end of KS1.

The programme introduces phonics and its application to early reading in a carefully sequenced and progressive way: moving from developing phonological awareness through rhyme, to introducing Grapheme–Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs) in order, through a six-phased progression. Children will learn the skills of blending and segmenting as new GPCs are introduced, reinforcing them throughout the programme. The programme also teaches children to read common exception words. These are words which cannot be decoded phonetically and have to be recognised on sight. The programme aims to build confident readers through the consistent, systematic, and daily teaching of the Success for All Phonics programme with accompanying 'Shared Readers'. Our aim is for children to become fluent, confident readers by the end of Key Stage 1.

The programme provides pacey and active lessons that balance short inputs of direct teaching with immediate whole-class response and engagement. The multisensory lessons engage all children in a variety of activities designed to support learning in fun and memorable ways. Activities include: saying the Alphabet Chant with actions, responding to questions either chorally or with their Talk Partner, and/or actively reading with their partner, and writing in the air or on their partner’s back. Lessons also link pictures and mnemonics to support the learning and recall of each GPC.

The phonics programme provides texts called Shared Readers, which are exactly aligned to the phonics being taught. The children are motivated to apply their new learning in a meaningful way. The reading lessons develop a separate, but linked, approach to the teaching of reading comprehension during the shared reading lessons. Children will take home the book they have read in class, so that they can continue to practise and get to the stage where they can read it automatically, no longer needing to sound the words out. Parents are encouraged to support their child to re-read words, sentences and whole texts. 

Within the scope of the programme, dedicated time is planned in for review and consolidation of skills to ensure that children do not fall behind. The programme plans in frequent and comprehensive formative and summative assessment opportunities to inform teaching and ensure that children’s progress is closely monitored. This enables early identification of children who may need additional support.

The programme provides comprehensive lesson planning and resources, as well as training and ongoing support, from the FFT/SfA team. All members of staff in school who teach or support phonics have had comprehensive training as well as ongoing CPD. We ensure that all new members of staff receive this training as a priority. Monitoring of the programme and phonics teaching is undertaken by the phonics lead (K. Matthews) and English Lead (L. Short). 

 

The document below clearly sets out which GPCs pupils will learn within each week along with common exception words. 

Reading for Pleasure!

Birthday Book Scheme

Many parents generously send class treats into school when it’s their child’s birthday. Instead of sweets or chocolates, you may like to support our idea to donate a lasting treat…a brand-new book for the school library! By donating a book on your child’s birthday, pupils across the whole school will benefit and the gift will be treasured and shared for many years to come. Every book donated as part of the Birthday Book Scheme will have a special dedication in the front so that children reading it will know who it was donated by. We will be uploading a book ‘wish list’ to the school website. It is our aim to enable all pupils to enjoy reading for pleasure, and with your support, our library shelves can be boosted with the latest releases! Please note this is completely optional and as a school, we would always support parental choice. 

If you would like to join in with the Birthday Book Scheme, you can find recommended reads for each year group below. Alternatively, please feel free to order any book you would like to. 

Recommended Reads by Year Group

Name
 RECEPTION-CHECKLIST-2PP-web.pdfDownload
 YEAR-1-CHECKLIST.pdfDownload
 YEAR-2-CHECKLIST.pdfDownload
 YEAR-3-CHECKLIST.pdfDownload
 YEAR-4-CHECKLIST.pdfDownload
 YEAR-5-CHECKLIST.pdfDownload
 YEAR-6-CHECKLIST-1.pdfDownload
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Our Reading Corners

At Albrighton, we pride ourselves on our fun and vibrant reading corners. We ensure that our bold displays, comfy seating and wide variety of books encourage our pupils to want to read for pleasure. 
We also have 'Reading Treasure' boxes in our classrooms to reiterate the importance of looking after our books. In every classroom, you will find 'Peer Recommendations' this is where pupils can suggest books, that they think are wonderful, to their friends so that they can enjoy them too!