WHY WE TEACH READING
At Ravenscroft, we firmly believe that teaching a child to read is one of the most important things we do. Throughout the primary school journey, we teach pupils all the basic skills needed to enable a child to read independently, as learning to read is one of the keys to independence in learning.
We want your child to love reading – and to want to read for enjoyment. This is why we work hard to make sure children develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read. Children who read for enjoyment every day develop a broader vocabulary, increased general knowledge and a better understanding of other cultures.
We believe the most important factors in learning to read are: enjoyment, understanding, confidence, independence and fluency. We aim to promote a lifelong love of reading and for our children will be both independent and reflective readers who can read fluently and for meaning.
HOW WE TEACH READING
At Ravenscroft we plan reading around a range of quality texts to provide our children with the opportunity to form opinions about author styles and text genres. They are encouraged to apply their reading skills for a range of purposes as they work across the curriculum, reading from fiction and non-fiction books as well electronic texts and real-life examples such as newspapers, brochures, leaflets and instructions.
Children read in school independently, with peers and as a shared class session. They listen to adults and other children read, take part in paired, group and whole class reading sessions and discussions within the classroom.
We teach the skills of reading (outlined in the National Curriculum and the KS1 and KS2 test domains) in Guided Reading sessions through the use of VIPERS which were created by Rob Smith (The Literacy Shed). VIPERS is an acronym to aid the recall of the 6 reading domains and are the key areas which we feel children need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts; Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval, Sequence or Summarise.
In KS2, children apply reading skills in Reading Journal sessions using a whole class novel which is read to pupils by the class teacher. In these lessons, we teach children how to structure responses to different question types modelling the use of sentence stems and oral rehearsal.
At Ravenscroft we follow the Phonics Shed programme to deliver daily phonics to all children across EYFS and KS1 in order build the foundations for reading. We use Phonics Shed and Oxford Reading Tree as our core reading schemes. Our children are also encouraged to choose books from the school library to develop their independent reading skills and their love of reading.
To promote a love for reading, we provide opportunities for our children to enjoy books of their choice holding regular book swaps, book fairs, ‘Read with Me’ sessions for parents, World Book Day events, playtime reading, reading buddies and reading rewards.
WHAT YOUR CHILD WILL LEARN
- Develop the habit of reading widely and often, from a wide range of reading materials for both pleasure and information.
- Develop a wide range of vocabulary.
- Build an appreciation of our rich and varied literary heritage.
- Read with confidence, fluency and understanding, drawing upon a range of independent strategies to self-monitor and correct.
- Develop the skills required to achieve a lifetime of enjoyment through reading.
