Reading
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From September 2022, early reading is now supported through the Read Write Inc scheme. All staff have attended training and development days to ensure they are equipped to teach with the expertise and skills required to promote excellent progress, as well as a love of reading.
The consistent and uniform approach, which is seen as a key strength of RWI, means that all children, no matter their starting point or streamed group, have high-quality, familiar sessions delivered.
Where teachers note that children have successfully grasped the requirements of RWI and have shown strong capabilities in reading (sight reading and the understanding of the text), they begin to be introduced to our bespoke 'Recommended Reads' system.
When children have successfully completed the RWI programme, they develop deeper reading skills making use of each year group's 'Recommended Reads'. These are age-appropriate, high-quality texts selected from many wildly-used lists (CLPE, The Book Trust, Books for Topics etc). There are a range of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and graphic novels in each year group, with multiple copies of each, so that children can develop their love of reading for pleasure and generate book talk amongst their peers. We feel the significant investment in this area is vital, and continue to update each year group's titles as new, recommended books are released. We try to ensure that books are also selected which reflect our children, so that they can identify with the characters and authors. Book selection is guided by the teacher, with careful consideration given to each child's interests, prior reading and general book-talk.
We have also invested in the RWI 'Fresh Start' additional resources to be used as a catch-up and intervention programme in order to target children in older year groups who still need to accelerate their reading progress.
We pack our weekly newsletter with details of recommendations and author book matches to help guide and engage our children and parents at home.
In one area of dedicated comprehension lessons, children in Year 1 to Year 6 have access to 'Cracking Comprehension' units which make use of a multitude of text-types and question styles. Teachers use these to model approaches to understanding texts and further decoding.
Guidance for parents to support RWI at home can be found here.
Our Learning Resource Centre
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All children visit the library element of our Learning Resource Centre. This is another way of giving children access to quality texts and allows them to become discerning readers who make personal choices on other books they read alongside their 'Recommended Read'.
Book Week & Author Visits
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At SSPP, we celebrate with a week-long set of events and lessons close to World Book Day. These are usually themed (2020 - Bedtime Stories; 2022 - Wild About Reading; 2023 - Reading Is Out Of This World). We often work from a school-wide text at this point, which mirrors our activities from World Poetry Day. Despite the substantial cost to the school, we make every effort to secure an author visit (and these are sometimes at multiple points of the year). The calibre of author is high at SSPP, tailoring who we choose to ensure that we feel they will entertain and more importantly enthuse our children. In recent years we have had visits from Anthony Lishak, Brian Moses, Jennifer Bell, Maz Evans and Ross Montgomery. The workshops which take place during these visits are a real highlight, allowing children to step into the world of the professional author.
Reciprocal Reading
We make use of a hybrid model for Reciprocal Reading which draws on the question styles seen with this approach, alongside a more traditional whole-class guided reading model. This gives children exposure to further texts, where dialogue about their reading is so important, and also helps them to address reading targets through well-constructed question and answers sessions, as well as additional activities.
End-Of-Day Readers
All classes have designated timetable slots for their end-of-day class readers. These are age-appropriate texts read to the class, where the teacher is modelling reading with intonation to maintain the listener's interest. These are chosen with a main focus on engaging characters and are read mostly for pleasure, but allow further book talk and exploration as a class.
To view our English Overview page, please click here.
To view details about our writing curriculum, please click here.
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