How we teach Reading

How we teach Reading at Cam Woodfield Junior School

Reading During Lessons

At Cam Woodfield Junior School, we understand the importance of reading. We see the teaching of reading skills vital to develop children’s communication and oracy skills and therefore, we ensure that the reading skills we develop influence our writing and communication skills. Reading takes place daily as part of English or Foundation Subject  lessons and focuses not only on the reading of new words but also focus on developing comprehension skills. These comprehension skills are based on key elements from the National Curriculum including defining, retrieving, inferring and predicting. Children will have the opportunity to learn and practise these skills and apply them to a range of different quality text types, which will influence their writing. In our English lessons, teachers follow a cycle to allow children to acquire decoding, fluency and comprehension skills, and then apply these skills to an unknown text on a weekly basis.

Reading

Children’s reading levels will be assessed and given a reading book to take home to read. Children will also be given a reading ladder, which shows the colour band your child is currently working at as well as where your child should be working, by the end of their year group. Throughout the year, the teacher will listen to your child read and move them up a colour and when they think they are ready. At Cam Woodfield Junior School, we promote reading at home through a reading challenge. Children are expected to read at home three times per week and record this on Boomhub.  Each week, a year group trophy is presented to the children with the most logged reads.  Classes with the most logged reads will also receive frequent rewards.

Phonics

When children join us in year 3, we will carry out a baseline assessment of their phonics knowledge and understanding. If a child requires key phonics teaching to assist them with their reading, this will form a part of their normal daily routine. Children will also have target intervention groups throughout the week to focus on new sounds and learn the skills needed to decode and segment words. Throughout any phonics teaching, we follow the Letters and Sounds Little Wandle scheme. Throughout our school, we aim to continue to support children with their phonics skills to ensure they become fluent readers.

Developing a Love of Reading

At Cam Woodfield Junior School, we want every child to become a passionate reader. To enable children to do this, we share a wide range of text types with children to enable them to become immersed in new worlds. Teachers also encourage children to try books of different genres to open up their minds to new texts. All of our themes centre around a high-quality text for the children to really delve into and link into many other parts of their learning. As well as this, we provide many opportunities for children to further develop their interest in reading such as the opportunity to take part in author workshops at school and of course celebrating World Book Day.