Reading
Reading Intent
At Randlay Primary School, we believe reading is a fundamental skill that opens the door to lifelong learning and discovery; we aim to cultivate a vibrant reading culture that ignites curiosity and fosters a love of reading among our pupils. Through a supportive environment that encourages learners to explore diverse texts and develop essential literacy skills, our intention is to empower our learners to become confident, fluent readers who adopt positive reading habits. From the moment our learners begin their journey, we strive to instil a passion for reading and prioritise its teaching.
As a school we aim to:
- Encourage Exploration: Provide a diverse selection of books that reflect the interests and backgrounds of all learners, inspiring them to explore new ideas and cultures.
- Develop reading skills: Equip our learners with the essential reading skills to enhance fluency, comprehension and critical thinking, ensuring they can read a variety of texts with confidence.
- Promote Collaboration: Create opportunities for our learners to share their reading experiences through discussions, peer reading, book clubs, and projects, building a community of enthusiastic readers.
- Celebrate Achievement: Recognise and celebrate individual progress fostering a sense of accomplishment and motivation through our weekly assemblies.
- Engage Families: Involve families in their children’s reading journey by providing resources, workshops, and events that encourage reading at home.
Together, we strive to instil a passion for reading that will empower our learners both in and outside of the classroom.
Reading Implementation
Reading in Nursery
Daily Phonics
At Randlay Primary School, reading begins upon entry to our Nursery setting, where learners start the Foundations for Phonics Little Wandle scheme.
Sharing Texts
Within our Nursery setting, learners are encouraged to share picture books and enjoy stories and rhymes with staff and peers. They are encouraged to take library books home to continue the process of listening to stories and engaging with pictures, rhymes and repetitive patterned stories with an adult.
The Environment
We ensure that our ‘enabling environments’ within the nursery provide rich, inclusive reading opportunities for all the children who access it through both adult and child led activities. This is of equal importance both inside and out.
Reading in Reception
In Reception learners continue their reading journey through daily phonics lessons, story times and opportunities to engage in discussion based on a shared text. There are opportunities for the learners to access a wide range of inclusive fiction, non-fiction and poetry books.
Daily Phonics Lesson
In reception, pupils are introduced to the progression of graphemes (letters) and the phonemes (sounds) that they make. These are taught using picture prompts and catchphrases as well as the use of pronunciation phrases and formation phrases to ensure that they are saying and writing the letters correctly. They also start to learn the ‘tricky’ words that cannot be sounded out but that they will see often in reading. Throughout the reception year phases 2, 3 and four of the programme will be covered. They will learn digraphs (2 letters making 1 sound such as sh, ee) and trigraphs (3 letters making 1 sound e.g. igh, ear).
During phonics sessions, pupils practice reading words with the focus sounds, they learn new tricky words and apply their new learning to spell words.
Home Reading Expectations
All children take home a reading book from the start of Reception. These books are introduced once learners have had an opportunity to complete each group of focus sounds. They access books that are phonetically decodable featuring the sounds that they have been taught to date. This is to encourage fluency, ensuring that they have the necessary skills to decode independently.
Parents/carers are encouraged to share the reading experience with children. We request that they comment upon their child’s reading within their reading diary as regularly as possible but at least four times per week. The class teacher and/or TA will hear the children read three times per week as part of the Little Wandle reading practice sessions. Practitioners will share observations of reading experiences in the child’s reading diary.
Children are encouraged to practice reading the books several times to develop the necessary fluency skills. A stock of exciting, phonetically decodable books have been purchased, and all new scheme books are linked directly to the ‘Little Wandle’ scheme.
The Environment
All classrooms display a Little Wandle ‘Grow the Code’ chart for learners to refer to as needed. These are used regularly in all phonics and writing lessons and table-top versions are also used. The children will be introduced to the ‘Tricky Words’ linked to each of the phases. The words will be on display across the environment and opportunities to use and apply these will be encouraged daily.
Assessment
We use half-termly assessment points to track the progress/attainment of individuals, classes and cohorts. Each child will be assessed using the Little Wandle assessments and tracking tool once every half term.
Interventions
If gaps are identified, targeted interventions are put into place to ensure learners move at an appropriate pace and not repeat phases. Interventions must be timely, efficient and effective. The learners are then reassessed and once back on track the additional interventions cease.
Our Reading Offer
It is key to our practice that phonics understanding, both using and applying, is in evident when children are taught and observed within the setting. All additional adults have been trained to identify, promote and facilitate the application of phonics and reading with our youngest children.
Reading in Year One
Daily Phonics
Upon moving into Year One, the learners continue to access a daily taught systematic synthetic discreet phonics session following the progression of the Little Wandle Scheme. It is our aim that all learners will access Phase 5 from the beginning of Year One to support their journey in developing their reading fluency and understanding. This will ensure that they are on track to meet the end of the year expectations, including the Year One phonics screening check.
Year One Group Reading
Once learners have made the transition to Year One, they continue to access the three reading practice sessions. During each guided session, there is a clear taught focus. The first session focuses on decoding skills, the second reading with prosody and the third session an aspect of comprehension.
Assessment and Tracking
Over the course of Year One, learners will be assessed using Little Wandle half-termly assessments, which are tracked using the Little Wandle assessment tracker. If at any point a learner is falling behind or developed gaps, then additional interventions take place to bring the learners up to speed as quickly as possible. This can be completed through additional reading opportunities and precision teaching.
At the end of Year One, learners complete the statutory phonics screening check. If children do not meet the expected standard for this then they will retake the check at the end of Year Two.
Learners also complete end of term Headstart Reading Assessments to check attainment against age-related expectations.
Book bands are also tracked and matched carefully to phonics ability to ensure learners re able to read these fluently and in the summer term, they will complete a fluency assessment to ensure accuracy and fluency within their reading.
Reading in Year Two
Phonics
Once our learners have moved to Year Two, they will either start the Little Wandle Year Two spelling programme or continue with the Little Wandle phonics programme, dependent on their current attainment. All learners need to be secure with their phonics knowledge before moving on.
Year Two Reading Routines
Initially, all learners will continue with the three reading practice sessions each week, at the appropriate phonics phase. After the first half-term, learners who have completed the phonics programme will complete a fluency assessment to determine if they are ready to move from the phonics phased books to the colour banded system and Little Wandle Fluency texts.
Once accessing the fluency texts, these are completed as part of a ‘reading journal’ focus. One chapter will be read each week, with a different reading focus each day. The chapter is introduced with a pre-teach to focus on decoding skills, tricky words and word meanings to support learners to be able to access the chapter fluently. The chapter will then be reread every day to support the development of fluency with a daily focus on different reading skills such as vocabulary, retrieval, inference, summary, sequencing and prediction. The fluency texts will be a range of fiction and non-fiction texts and will gradually increase in difficulty each term.
Classes will also use a range of different text types as an integral part of English lessons in a range of genres. These will involve numerous opportunities for book talk to explore a variety of aspects and a stimulus for exploring features of grammar and the creation of their own texts.
In Year Two, learners continue to have a daily story time and opportunities to read for pleasure.
The use of Reading diaries continues into Year Two, by which stage learners should continue to comment on their reading experiences at least four times per week, with a balance of comments made by themselves and their parents/ carers.
Assessment and Tracking
Learners are assessed using ongoing teacher assessment, fluency assessments and summative reading assessments each term to establish a scaled score.
Reading in Key Stage Two
In Key Stage Two, it is our intention that learners continue to develop a love of reading underpinned by positive reading habits: as well as having an increased confidence to approach and read new texts which challenge and excite them. They build upon the fundamental phonics skills taught in Key Stage One, and progress through book banded books as their reading fluency and accuracy develop. To encourage engagement and enjoyment of reading, each class has a class reader which is shared daily, and activities are completed around this text. Each class has a stock of high-quality non-fiction, fiction and poetry banded books which the children have access to daily. There are multiple opportunities for reading for pleasure during the school day and every class shares the class reader at the end of the day.
Year Three and Four Class Reading
There is a clear, progressive weekly sequence for the teaching of skills. To promote the importance of reading, every class morning routine starts with a reading session. Sessions broadly follow the structure outlined below and the expectation is clearly differentiated according to ability:
Reading Routines in School:
Session 1: Share the chapter for the week from the class reader and discuss as a class.
Session 2: Explore key vocabulary in the chapter.
Session 3: Develop retrieval skills through questions relating to the chosen chapter.
Session four: Develop inference skills through questions relating to the chosen chapter.
Session 5: Use and apply a range of reading skills across a range of texts.
Reading Routines at Home:
To encourage our leaners to foster effective reading habits and to develop their key reading skills, it is the expectation that they read at home as well as in school. Children in Year Three and Four are expected to read four times a week and their diary comments are structured in way which reflect the key reading skills taught in our class reading sessions.
Assessment
Learners are assessed during lessons and feedback is given to help develop their understanding of the text. Weekly comprehension tasks enable teachers to assess the learners’ progress on a regular basis and adapt support as needed. At the end of each term, the children complete a reading assessment taken from ‘Head Start’. At least once a term, each learners’ book band is assessed using the Collins ‘Assess Reading Fluency’ and this is closely monitored to ensure all learners are developing their reading fluency. This data, combined with teacher assessment, is used to inform attainment judgements and target setting. If learners are not on track, interventions are used to ensure their reading progress stays in line with expectations.
Year Five and Six Class Reading
There is a clear, progressive weekly sequence for the teaching of skills. To promote the importance of reading, every class morning routine starts with a reading session. Sessions broadly follow the structure outlined below and the expectation is clearly differentiated according to ability:
Reading Routines in School:
Session 1: Share the chapter for the week from the class reader and discuss as a class.
Session 2: Explore key vocabulary in the chapter.
Session 3: Develop retrieval skills through questions relating to the chosen chapter.
Session four: Develop inference skills through questions relating to the chosen chapter.
Session 5: Use and apply a range of reading skills across a range of texts.
Reading Routines at Home:
To encourage our leaners to foster effective reading habits and to develop their key reading skills, it is the expectation that they read at home as well as in school. Children in Year Five and Six are expected to read four times a week and their diary comments are structured in way which reflect the key reading skills taught in our class reading sessions.
Year Six SATs Boosters
Booster sessions for year six learners commence after half term in the Autumn term and continue throughout the year until the SATs in the Summer term. All learners are given the opportunity to attend an additional reading lesson before or after school. We provide revision material which they use in the session and can be taken home. We provide breakfast (before school) and snacks (after school) to ensure that all learners can fully concentrate and participate in our sessions.
Assessment
Learners are assessed during lessons and feedback is given to help develop their understanding of the text. Weekly comprehension tasks enable teachers to assess the learners’ progress on a regular basis and adapt support as needed. At the end of each term, the children complete a reading assessment taken from ‘Head Start’. At least once a term, each learners’ book band is assessed using the Collins ‘Assess Reading Fluency’ and this is closely monitored to ensure all learners are developing their reading fluency. This data, combined with teacher assessment, is used to inform attainment judgements and target setting. If learners are not on track, interventions are used to ensure their reading progress stays in line with expectations.
Whole School Book Banding
All texts are banded according to their level of difficulty and staff, parents, carers and learners are fully informed with regards to the book banding system. The book bands progress according to difficulty and learners are assessed using the book banding system
A clear example of the book band order is displayed within each class base. Picture books are not banded but phonic scheme books are banded by phases/ stages. These will differ slightly in difficulty from the other texts and so staff will need to check when moving between schemes and the wider range of texts as the band allocated may differ slightly.
Reading for pleasure
To promote a reading culture that ignites curiosity and fosters a love of reading among our learners, we continue to review and adapt our reading for pleasure offer.
Our main approaches include, but are not limited to:
- Reading for pleasure slots
- Reading raffle and book vending machines
- Reading bears (Ks1)
- Book clubs
- Author visit
- Book corners
- Library trips
- Book fairs
SEND Support
We use adaptive teaching to enable all pupils to access the reading curriculum and make progress. This is carefully planned to meet the individual needs of our pupils.
This can include:
- Precision Teaching
- Little Wandle SEND Programme
- Little Wandle ‘Rapid Catch Up’ for Key Stage Two
- Little Wandle Fluency for Key Stage Two
- Beanstalk Volunteer Readers (1:1 reading opportunities)
- Pre-teaching opportunities
- 1:1 or small group additional support
- Literacy Hornet Primer
- Toe by Toe
Summary
At Randlay Primary School, we give the teaching of phonics and reading high priority. It is our intention that all our learners become confident, successful readers. To achieve this, we hold weekly reading assemblies and encourage staff to share dialogues with children about books. It is our shared aspiration that all our learners’ access both varied and rich opportunities for reading and we plan the skills for teaching reading strategically. We strive to achieve independence and enthusiasm in all our learners so that they can access a range of genres and text types. As a staff, we ensure that we provide equal opportunities across reading so that all our learners can reach their full potential and attain success. We strongly believe reading is an entitlement that empowers children for life beyond the primary phase and at Randlay School our practitioners work extremely hard to achieve this shared intention.
Reading Impact
Reading has a high profile across school from Nursery to Year Six. Leaners speak enthusiastically about their reading books and are keen to read widely around subjects. They enjoy reading and story sessions, and they are keen to talk about their reading with each other or adults. Reading diaries evidence the reading taking place and children use books readily within other subject areas. The majority of learners leave Randlay Primary School and Nursery with at least the expected level of attainment in reading ready for the next part of their learning journey.
Writing
Intent
At Randlay School and Nursery, it is our intention that our learners become aspirational writers from the very beginning of their education with us. As a result, we endeavour to ensure that our pupils develop a genuine passion for Writing by promoting the most engaging opportunities possible. To facilitate the development of successful writers we firmly believe in the importance of confidence through empowerment. Therefore, it is our intention to enable our learners with the necessary Writing strategies and environments to ensure that they know more and remember more. Integral to this approach is our whole school ethos, ‘Working Together as One,’ through which we develop the positive relationships necessary to facilitate our budding writers, whilst they develop the skills necessary in becoming highly competent across this aspect of English.
Our Whole School Values for Writing
Our consistently high expectations are supported by our Randlay School Jigsaw, through which we promote our six core values of the school including, Respect, Collaboration, Creativity, Aspiration, Courage and Excellence. These form the basis of our intention for the development writing attitudes and as such facilitate our best practice:
- Respect– We insist on respect for the Writer and promote ways in which we discuss our learners written contributions respectfully.
- Collaboration– We encourage our learners to work together across a range of writing genres and writing opportunities.
- Creativity– We ensure our learners access and explore creative contexts for writing linked to our rolling programme overviews and Creative Curriculum themes.
- Aspiration– We encourage author visits and make valuable community links with the library etc. in order to share aspirational role models with our learners.
- Courage– We ask that our learners never give up and have the resilience to persevere when writing might be challenging in order to move their skills for writing on.
- Excellence– We promote the importance of striving for personal best, for achieving to their best possible standard yet.
These significant core values are underpinned by our clear intention to make writing opportunities relevant to our learners in relation to our whole school community and beyond. It is our sincere wish to provide a diverse, rich and exciting Writing offer for our learners. We recognise the importance of wider cultural issues and promote a consistently positive approach and equal opportunity for Writing, regardless of a pupil’s gender, cultural or socio economic background.
Implementation
EYFS
At Randlay School we ensure our youngest children are offered the highest quality Communication, Language and Understanding opportunities vital to their early education. In order to do this practitioners follow the guidance, ‘Development Matters in the Early Years Foundation Stage’ (EYFS). As a school we embrace the essence of this document which prepares our youngest children for learning through play and exploration, active learning, creating and thinking critically. Our children’s earliest experiences of Writing are encouraged through enabling environments, both in and out of doors that are rich in language, literacy and high quality phonics and reading opportunities. We recognise the ‘unique child’ in all of our children and complete individual observations that enable practitioners to facilitate next steps to support knowing more and remembering more, through ‘positive relationships’. The development of early language and secure knowledge of letters and their related sounds provide the structure necessary to becoming a young writer and Foundation Stage practitioners ensure that every opportunity is taken to capitalise on these. As a school we ensure that our youngest children are offered a great many high quality writing experiences, to develop mark making and ascribing meaning to those mark until over time. Throughout the Foundation Stage children will work towards the Writing Early Learning Goal which requires them: to write words in ways that match their spoken sounds. Write some common regular words. Write simple sentences which can be read by themselves and others, making sure that some words are spelt correctly and others are phonetically plausible.
Key Stage One and Key Stage Two
Our Writing implementation across Key Stage One and Two builds on the Foundation Stage offer which emphasises the importance of high quality writing experiences. To achieve this we continue to provide our learners with an in-depth knowledge of letters and the sounds that they make, throughout Year 1 and into Year 2. At which point our focus switches to the Support for Spelling, document. Throughout KS1 and 2, we follow the National Curriculum in order to meet statutory requirements for Writing. The programmes of study for writing across these key stages are constructed similarly to those for reading:
- Transcription (spelling and handwriting)
- Composition (articulating ideas and structuring speech and writing)
According to the National Curriculum document it is essential that teaching develops pupils’ competence in these two dimensions. In addition, our pupils are taught how to plan, revise, and evaluate their writing. These aspects of writing have been incorporated into the programmes of study for composition.
We believe that writing down ideas fluently depends on effective transcription: that is, on spelling quickly and accurately through knowing the relationship between sounds and letters (phonics) and understanding the morphology (word structure) and orthography (spelling structure) of words. Effective composition involves forming, articulating and communicating ideas, and then organising them coherently for a reader. This requires clarity, awareness of the audience, purpose and context, and an increasingly wider knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Confident writing also depends on an ability to produce fluent, legible and eventually speedy handwriting. Therefore we ensure that our implementation provides regular, carefully planned and well-structured opportunities to meet these requirements. As a staff we are mindful of the necessary elements for secure spelling, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation. Therefore, we have a well-structured programme of study that has been devised in line with age related expectations. Teachers take every opportunity to enhance pupil vocabulary that arises in conversation and as a result of high quality reading opportunities. Learners are encouraged to make links to develop their understanding and ability to use figurative language in their writing. They are taught how to work out and clarify the meanings of unknown words with more than one meaning and can explain how these might be used differently within a context. Our pupils are taught to control their speaking and writing contributions consciously making choices to use Standard English. They are taught to use all elements of spelling, grammar and punctuation effectively. As a school we make a conscious effort to ensure that our practitioners are empowered by the possibilities that our Writing Implementation offers to learners and we actively promote the value of teaching exciting, engaging and immersive lessons. Throughout their education with us, our pupils learn the correct terms to support their understanding of grammar. To do so, we ensure that teachers have a secure subject knowledge enabling them to do this consistently and accurately across the school. Our Writing offer is set out across a two year cycle to cater for our split age classes. These overviews include the coverage of all of required programmes of study across Fiction and Non-fiction writing genres. These are then carefully blocked and linked to our ‘Creative Curriculum’ Tree Plans ensuring that writing is relevant to other subject areas. As a school we work hard to ensure that Writing is of high status, rich and diverse in content and relevant to the truly immersive themes in which we engage our learners.
Assessment and Impact
At Randlay School we work hard to ensure that our opportunities to assess Writing and identify next steps to make a positive impact on teaching and learning are completed across each of the Key Stages. In the Foundation stage observations are made of the children’s independent mark making and written contributions. These are added to the pupil’s evidence base inside their Learning Journey alongside any practical or photographic examples. At the end of their Foundation Stage children are assessed by their teacher, as Emerging, Expected or Exceeding, Writing expectations in relation to the Early Learning Goal.
Throughout KS1 and 2, inside each pupil’s English book there is a comprehensive list of objectives that provide age related expectations for the academic year. These are presented as a, ‘Working Towards’, list an ‘At Expected’ list and a ‘Working Beyond Expectation’ list of statements that make the progression of skills for writing explicit. As each of the skills for the focus genres are taught, they build over a period of time to enable pupils to revisit and practice so that they know more and remember more. After a carefully considered, well planned build-up of skills and application of these, there is an opportunity for learners to write an independent extended piece of writing within the focus genre. Teachers assess this culmination piece against the age related expectations in the front of the book and target the pupil’s next steps. These are communicated verbally and through the use of an additional child focused target sheet that is stuck in books alongside the piece. The assessment of independent writing takes place twice over the course of every half term, this is approximately every two to three weeks. Teachers then shift their focus to the next genre whilst ensuring pupils are consistently reminded of the transferable skills across contexts. At the end of each term, practitioners must make a teacher judgement relating to the development of each pupil’s skills for writing. They then assess where each pupil’s progress and attainment is in relation to the age expected standards. Targets are formulated to meet next steps for learning and these are informed by any gaps appearing in pupil skill sets. The pupil targets can be grouped where appropriate to do so, to aid manageability of teacher workload. Standards are tracked termly through data collation using our online O Track system, which teachers update for their own pupils. SMT and SLT have access to all assessments and often take samples of books from across each Key Stage to ensure that teacher judgements are in line and accurate. As a result of our dynamic, exciting and rigorous approach to Writing, by the end of each Key Stage our pupils are expected to know, apply and understand the matters, skills and processes specified in the relevant programme of study. They are able to talk about their Writing and can articulate how and what they have learnt across the specific skills in order enable and empower them. Our pupils have a clear understanding of different genres and are able to explain why some features are specific to particular types of writing. We are confident that our learners become competent and capable writers, they have a genuine love for Writing and appreciate the true power of the written word when it is executed well.