Reading at Romiley Primary School
Reading is at the heart of the curriculum at Romiley Primary School. Our aim is to teach children to become confident and competent readers by learning how to word read and by developing comprehension skills. We encourage a love of reading to help them to become life-long learners. This is why we work hard to make sure children develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read. Reading is encouraged across the curriculum and wherever possible, our writing is centred around high quality texts. The children visit our wonderful library every week where they are encouraged to recommend and swap books. We have a school story time at the end of the school day, so every child gets to listen to stories. We use Pie Corbett’s reading spine, to ensure our children are exposed to the best and classic children’s literature there is to offer. Our children have class sets of books which they study in lessons, they read individually and in groups. We have high expectations of our children in reading and they rise to the challenge!
Reading for Pleasure
Reading is at the heart of our curriculum. We want children to experience a wide range of texts and develop a love for reading and books.
We have a wonderful well stocked school library run by our school librarian and Year 6 prefects. Children have a weekly lesson in the library, but it is also open at lunchtimes for children to purely sit and enjoy books .
On a weekly basis, children choose a book to read and share at home just for pleasure.
Every classroom has an engaging reading area and a class library with age appropriate books.
Reading mornings in EYFS are a chance for parents to come into school and share books with their children.
We have reading buddies where our oldest children read with our youngest.
We celebrate our readers with termly reading awards.
At 3pm the whole school stops and every class settles down to an end of day story read by the class teachers.
Reading Approaches
At Romiley Primary School, we ensure teaching reading runs throughout the curriculum.
Children read as part of topic lessons, individually, 1:1 with an adult and in groups. We use the Leicester inference approach to model and teach reading. Within this model, there is a strong emphasis on vocabulary and language acquisition. We ensure that children have full understanding of the vocabulary in the text , before they begin to look at it for comprehension.
Children are encouraged to find definitions, ask questions, sequence main events and summarise the text.
Reading content domains are taught through the use of VIPERS. The children quickly become aware of the type of question they are answering in comprehension activities.
V = Vocabulary
I = Inference
P = Predict
E = Explain
R = Retrieve
S = Summarise
Early Reading
Assessment
Regular and efficient monitoring of children’s development in phonics is essential if they are to become competent and confident readers. We follow the Monster Phonics programme which has a clearly mapped set of assessments which allows for checking children’s grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC), knowledge of High-Frequency Words (HFWs) and Common Exception Words (CEWs) for reading and writing. This evidence is entered onto a bespoke phonics tracker to enable progress to be monitored and gaps in learning identified and addressed.
PM benchmarking is used to assess children’s levels on the colour band reading scheme. Children read 1:1 with an adult on an unseen text to assess their instructional and independent reading level which is then matched to the appropriate colour band.
We use NFER and past SAT’s papers to assess comprehension.
Phonics
We love phonics at Romiley! Click here to find out about how we teach phonics through Monster Phonics and how you can help your child at home.
We follow the Monster Phonics DfE validated child-centred phonics programme. Children make progress because the approach is meaningful, interactive, and easy to understand, creating high engagement.
The systematic colour-coding of graphemes linked to phoneme monsters makes phonics easier to understand. Children also love the monsters, who bring phonics to life. Our activities are multisensory requiring reading, writing, singing and actions.
We aim to ensure that children can:
· Apply the skill of blending phonemes in order to read words.
· Segment words to their constituent phonemes in order to spell words.
· Learn that blending and segmenting words are reversible processes.
· Read high frequency words that do not conform to regular phonic patterns.
· Read texts and words that are within their phonic capabilities as early as possible.
· Decode texts effortlessly so all their resources can be used to comprehend what they read.
Children receive a phonic decodable reading book to directly match their stage of learning.
Interventions
Our whole school tracking system and specialised phonics tracker allows us to closely monitor children who are falling behind in learning or accelerating through their reading journey.
If support is required, we provide quality, targeted interventions, delivered by specialised TA’s. These include:
Phonics interventions
BRP
SERI
GERI
Leicester Inference
All interventions are monitored with beginning and end data to track progress. This is reported to the class teacher and SENCo in SEND reviews and reports.
For more able readers, independent reading and reading for pleasure is encouraged. Age appropriate class libraries with quality texts support with this aim. They are also provided with higher level comprehension tasks.
