Our Reading Journey at St Augustine’s Catholic Primary School

Vision:

At St Augustine’s, reading is at the heart of everything we do. We aspire to develop fluent and confident readers that have a genuine love of books that lasts a lifetime.

Intent:

Our pupils are equipped with a range of strategies for decoding words and texts which promotes fluency as well as independent while reading. Through developing these strategies, our long term aim is to enable children to read for meaning and understanding, as well as for pleasure. We expose children to a broad range of genres that incorporate a variety of contexts, cultures and traditions. From entry, the children are guided through this exciting and engaging journey by true reading role models; our staff who all approach literature with passion and enthusiasm

In line with the National Curriculum Objectives for Reading, our intent is that all pupils:

• read easily, fluently and with good understanding
• develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
• acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
• appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage.

We incorporate the Curriculum by Unity Schools Partnership (CUSP) to support our teaching of  Reading which draws on a range of texts and sources. These texts include content from   from  History, Geography and Science. Expert subject knowledge is carefully woven into the teaching of our Reading Curriculum  which gives teachers the opportunity to teach key reading skills before applying these independently.

English Long Term Overview

Phonics and Early Reading

At St. Augustine’s, we recognise that mastery in phonics is fundamental to children being able to access a broad range of fiction and non-fiction texts across the curriculum. We aim to achieve this by teaching phonics systematically with a relentless drive to address the needs of all learners.

Implementation:

We have implemented the synthetic phonics programme ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’; this is a method of learning letter sounds and blending them together to read and write words.

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP). We prioritise the teaching of phonics; we teach phonics daily in Reception and Year 1. It is vitally important that children review and revisit Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs) and words, daily, weekly and across terms and years, in order to move this knowledge into the children’s long-term memory. Our consistent approach to phonics ensures that children are given the best possible foundation for reading, writing and language skills. 

Children need to learn to read as quickly and reasonably as possible, so that they can move from learning to read, to reading to learn, opening up new worlds and adventures to them. Our expectations of progression are aspirational yet achievable; children who are not keeping up with their peers will be given additional practise immediately through keep-up sessions.

Children enjoy a range of multi-sensory resources to support their phonics learning. On-going assessment of children’s progress takes place and the books children read in school and take home to read are fully decodable and matched to children’s secure phonics knowledge. As well as fully decodable books, children take home a non-decodable book for sharing that can be either read to or with them. These books play an essential role in developing a love of reading and language; an important distinction is that these books are being shared with the children, but they are using fully phonically decodable books to practise their independent reading.

The table below is a summary based on the phonics progression:

Phase	Phonic Knowledge and Skills
Phase One (Nursery)	Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting.
Phase Two (Reception) Autumn 1 and 2	Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.
Phase Three (Reception) Spring 1 and 2	Graphemes such as ai, ee, igh representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the “simple code”, i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.
Phase Four (Reception) Summer 1 and 2	No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.
Phase Five (Throughout Year 1)	Now we move on to the “complex code”. Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.
Phase Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond)	Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters in line with the National Curriculum.

You can find resources to support your child with their letter sounds, reading and letter formation by visiting the Little Wandle website – https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/ 

Little Wandle Phonics Overview – Reception

Little Wandle Phonics Overview – Year 1

EYFS

In EYFS, we encourage a love of reading right from the start and read stories to the children daily. The aim is to expose children to a range of books that not only develop a love of reading, but to also develop their oracy, vocabulary and comprehension.

Through this, children begin to internalise new vocabulary, language patterns and begin to retell stories. Our curriculum is carefully constructed to prepare children and ensure that there is cohesion and consistency with our approach through:

• The inclusion of high-quality texts which are age and stage appropriate
• Modelled reading and re-telling opportunities across each session
• Dedicated phonics sessions, employing tricky and high-frequency words
• Cooperative learning behaviours which develop oracy and interdependence.

Children are encouraged to apply their phonics in independent and supported writing opportunities across the curriculum from letters, lists, recipes, short stories and information reports.

In EYFS, we engage parents in reading by inviting them to termly ‘Breakfast and a Book’ events. These sessions are aimed to promote a love of reading for pleasure for both parents and pupils.

Key Stage 1 and 2

We teach Reading using Curriculum by Unity Schools Partnership (CUSP). CUSP is an evidence informed, carefully sequenced English curriculum, which maps core content in Reading across the primary journey, ensuring that learning is taught and revisited over time so that pupils commit their understanding to the long-term memory.

Pupils will receive a daily diet of excellent reading teaching and this will be supplemented by regular opportunities to engage with shared reading experiences, promoting the joy of reading with the whole school community. Our reading curriculum exposes children to the marvellous literary works of classic authors as well as introducing them to some of the more niche contemporary authors who they may have never come across during their own personal exploration. Every text is purposefully selected to challenge our pupils to read more fluently, to add to their ever growing vocabulary store and to offer them insight into worlds beyond those that they’ve experienced in life so far.

This breadth of literature exposes children to experiences that they deserve to discover and ultimately plays a significant role in raising their cultural capital. With well embedded cross-curricular links, we are proud that this literature spine equips our children with the wealth of knowledge required to progress in school and beyond.

Our Literature Spine

We have an unapologetically aspirational literature spine that runs throughout school; from Nursery all the way to Year 6. This backbone of books is expertly mapped; ensuring that children access and revisit a range of fiction and non-fiction  text types across a multitude of themes and genres year after year. 

Reading Spine

Click on the images below:

 

Reading mileage

We know that one of the single most important factors in developing reading fluency is reading mileage. The more children read, the more fluent they become and at St Augustine’s, children read a lot. Reading is woven into the fabric of every curriculum area and is evident in lessons by giving children opportunities to read independently, to read to their peers and to read out loud in small groups or to the class. In addition to this, many of our children get the opportunity to read, one to one, with an adult during the school day. We also draw upon our strong working relationships with our parents and families to encourage home reading at least 5 times a week. For this, the children get to use our well-stocked school library which is a treasure trove of exciting fiction and non-fiction books for the children to take home and enjoy. 

Whole Class Reading

Although reading is an element in almost every lesson at St Augustine’s, every child from Year 2 enjoys whole class reading lessons. These well-structured lessons are the backbone of reading instruction at our school and one of the key elements that allow our young readers to grow and progress. Our reading lessons are a place where all learners, regardless of their ability, come together to enjoy, discuss and pick apart some of the more challenging texts from our literature spine in a quest to, not only become more fluent readers, but to gain a deeper understanding of the things they read. To ensure that this is done in the best way possible, every lesson is drawn from an ever-evolving curriculum that has been expertly designed in response to some of the most comprehensive and current research from across the world.

 

All of our Reading lessons follow our Teaching and Learning model. 

Each reading lesson is structured in the following way:

Vocabulary – To begin each session, a selection of words that are anticipated to be unfamiliar to the pupils are taught explicitly. The meaning is explained, they are put into a sentence to demonstrate how they can be used and, in some instances, the morphology and etymology of words is explored. 

Fluency  – We wholly understand that fluent readers understand more of what they read and this is exactly why we cultivate fluency as a priority during these lessons with the aim of helping our children to develop their own inner reading voice. The three key elements required to do this: reading accuracy, prosody and reading pace are all developed using a variety of evidence-based strategies such as modelled reading, choral reading, paired reading, echo reading and timed reading. 

Discussion– After reading, the text is then discussed. Children are encouraged to ask questions in order to develop a better understanding of what has been read.

Skills and Strategies – The class teacher will introduce or recap a particular reading skill or strategy and model how it should be successfully applied by answering some questions about the text. Following that, the children will go on to independently answer questions focused around the same reading domain, using the skills and strategies that have been modelled, to demonstrate their understanding of the text.

Vocabulary 

In addition to being explicitly taught at the beginning of Whole Class Reading lessons, vocabulary is a hugely important element in our whole school curriculum and is mapped expertly across all subject areas. We recognise the importance of facilitating a language rich environment and just how crucial it is to constantly expose children to Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary. Most other subjects in school have a period in each lesson where new vocabulary is taught explicitly, just as it is during Whole Class Reading lessons, focusing on the meaning of words, how they are used, the morphology and etymology. We see, as children move through school, the cumulative effect of this strategy and the positive impact it has on our pupils’ abilities to understand and unpick unfamiliar texts. 

Our Reading Environment

As reading is such an integral part of our curriculum and of the culture of our school, it is always visible. Every classroom has a unique reading corner where children can relax and delve into a book of their choice from the brimming book shelves. Every classroom also has a Reading Working Wall which supports the learning that takes place during our daily Whole Class Reading lessons. These working walls build up over a block of learning and become resources to support the children during independent activities; showcasing new vocabulary, key discussion points or any new reading strategies that have been used in recent lessons. They also offer a snapshot into the wonderful literary works that the children have to look forward to at a later point in the year. Hopefully, you will notice that reading is celebrated throughout school and that this celebration is clearly visible in some shared spaces as you walk the corridors.

Wider engagement

Although many steps of this wondrous journey happen within the bounds of our classrooms, we aim to inspire children to read at every possible opportunity. One way we do this is by holding a weekly book club where children from across the year groups can come and enjoy stories, discuss books, make recommendations to one another and share their love of reading with their peers and the staff. This is a magical event that truly demonstrates everything that we try to encourage within our children. In addition to this, we have launched a second-hand book shop where, one evening a week, we sell second hand books to parents and children to allow them to discover new authors, find new favourite stories and just expand their view of the literary landscape. 

Reading at Home

We expect every child to read to an adult at home on a daily basis for 10 to 20 minutes. Whilst this is only an expectation, we hope you appreciate the impact this can have on your child’s education. We do appreciate that life is very busy and sometimes it might not be possible to listen to your child read every day.

Reading in our school is progressive and planned to meet the needs of all children. Assessments and are carried out regularly to ensure children are not only fluent readers but  understand the fundamental skills in of Reading. Teachers continuously assess the levels and abilities of the children through questioning during lessons and this allows them best to support children according to their level of ability. In addition, children are assessed termly on their reading skills in order for us to monitor and ensure progress.

Children will progress through book levels and through the development of their reading skills will be able to access and read a greater range of books. opening up a greater range of books available to them. The skills, vocabulary and writing styles learned through reading, will be applied to their own work in school.