Reading

The Importance of Reading 

There can be few things as powerful as regularly reading to a young child. It has astonishing benefits for children: comfort and reassurance, confidence and security, relaxation, happiness and fun. Giving a child time and full attention when reading them a story tells them they matter. It builds self-esteem, vocabulary and feeds imagination.

The National Literacy Trust https://literacytrust.org.uk/blog/reading-children-so-powerful-so-simple-and-yet-so-misunderstood/

Our love of reading at Brierley...

We believe that reading is at the centre of our learning. We base our reading on well-known authors and children are given the time to immerse themselves in stories. D.E.A.R. sessions where children 'Drop Everything And Read' are one way in which our children develop their pleasure in reading and sharing a wide range of texts.

We ensure that early language development is key to opening up a whole new world of vocabulary, provide age-appropriate phonics provision and promote a love of reading by immersing children in books and bringing reading to life.

There is no friend as loyal as a book. – Ernest Hemingway

Reading Areas

Our newly organised library and corridor space have established comfortable, accessible places for relaxing with a lovely book for all children. 

Reading Curriculum Pathway

 How we teach children to read.

The Reading Curriculum Pathway (above) identifies the core texts that are studied in each year group throughout the year. With reading being an important part of our curriculum and an integral part of all of our lessons, we ensure we use a structured approach to it. Our reading sessions are based around the 'reading to learn' approach (above) with age appropriate questions and opportunities for discussion. 

We teach reading through: 

• Phonics and Early Reading
• Reading for Pleasure
• Independent Reading
• Whole Class Reading/Echo Reading
• Comprehension lessons 

Accelerated Reader Programme 

Once children have successfully completed the RWI scheme and are achieving Age Expected reading levels, they will be base lined using the Accelerated Reader programme. This baseline will ensure that each child is given a book that is specific to their level of reading and understanding. Accelerated Reader will also assess reading ages so that this can be closely monitored throughout school.

Click here to read  'A Parent/Carer's Guide to the Accelerated Reader Programme'

Class Book Choices

Each year group will have a minimum 3 main books each academic year, supplemented and enhanced by other text types such as poetry and non-fiction. Children will read widely and for pleasure immersing themselves in different authors and text types throughout the year. Children also have the opportunity to explore a wide range of fiction and non-fiction texts in their foundation lessons, which are based around age appropriate texts linked to the topic being studied. 

For 2022-23 our reading book list includes:

FS2 -  Scarecrow's Wedding, Superworm, Gruffalo, What the Ladybird Heard, Rumble in the Jungle.

Year 1 - The Tale of the Naughty Little Rabbit, The Storm Whale, The Tiger Child, Jabari Jumps, The Emperor of Absurdia, Cinnamon and Meerkat Mail.

Year 2 - The Lighthouse Keeper's Lunch, Katie Morag delivers the mail, The Wolf's Secret, The Stone Giant, Dread Cat, Flat Stanley, Hodegheg and The Twits.

Year 3 - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Iron Man and The Boy Who Grew Dragons.

Year 4 - Charlotte’s Web, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The War Horse.

Year 5 - The Hobbit, Who Let the God's Out and Room Thirteen.

Year 6 - The Tempest, Goodnight Mister Tom and Some places more than others.

Example Book List (Year 2)

 What are Reading VIPERS?

VIPERS is an acronym to aid the recall of the 6 reading domains and they are the key areas which we feel children need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts. The 6 domains focus on the comprehension aspect of reading and not the mechanics: decoding, fluency etc.  As such, VIPERS is  a method of ensuring that teachers ask, and children are familiar with, a range of questions.  They allow teachers to track the type of questions asked and the children’s responses to these which allows for targeted questioning afterwards.

VIPERS Progression Documents

Vocabulary

Inference                                                     

Prediction

Explanation

Retrieval

Summarise/Sequence

Monitoring and Assessment of Reading

During whole class reading we encourage children to orally talk through their answers and ensure it is the best they can give. We also acknowledge it is good for children to also be able to formally record an answer. Children can do this in a variety of different ways such as discussing the answer first with peers and/or an adult and then writing their best answer, working individually and then editing their answer accordingly after discussion or orally discussing 1 or 2 of the questions and writing down the others working individually.

Teachers read with children, hearing them read individually, in pairs or groups and discussing answers.  Children are assessed based on National Curriculum expectations and how they are performing relating to the specific content domain.

RWI and Accelerated Reader assessments take place regularly to monitor the progress within each Key Stage. Baseline assessments including the Salford reading test, will take place in the first week of term, or as soon as a child starts at Brierley. Each term, classes will carry out formative assessment - NFER Tests – Years 1, 3, 4 and 5. SATs will be taken in Year 2 and 6 on a half termly basis.

Formative assessment is ongoing throughout each lesson. It judges progress and enables the teacher to make flexible adaptations to their planned teaching.

Effective formative assessment, daily marking and feedback and adult interaction within lessons is firmly embedded into our approach to teaching and learning of reading. All children are supported to develop, progress and move their learning forward through support, questioning and feedback. Children demonstrate the impact this has on improving their learning through editing and response.  Reading is assessed by teachers who use Insight for their year groups to allocate a level for each child.

Reading Fluency

Ultimately, our goal of teaching reading is to enable children to comprehend written texts. To do this, pupils need to build both word reading and language comprehension skills. However, developing reading fluency can provide a crucial bridge between the two, continually supporting pupils’ progression from learning to read to reading to learn. The diagram below shows how reading fluency is defined: reading with accuracy (reading words correctly), automaticity (reading words at an appropriate speed without great effort) and prosody (appropriate stress and intonation).

Our children will be able to: read fluently, retrieve, infer, predict, summarise, analyse and evaluate texts from a wide range of genres. By the time our children leave us at Year 6, they will be confident readers ready to move in to secondary school with skills to articulate what they have learnt and how they feel about a text.

Useful Websites for Parents and Carers

https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/ The National Literacy Trust

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/zt3rkqt  BBC Bitesize English

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zbxby9q BBC Bitesize Reading

https://www.booktrust.org.uk/books-and-reading/tips-and-advice/reading-tips/ Book Trust

Other useful documents:

Shining a spotlight on reading fluency

https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/eef-blog-shining-a-spotlight-on-reading-fluency