Lead Teachers: Miss V Hill, Mr R Gardner and Miss R Yeardley (Phonics)
Whiston Worrygoose Approach to Early Reading
Laying the Foundations for Reading
Synthetic phonics has been proven to be the most effective approach to developing early reading proficiency and at Whiston Worrygoose we believe this is the best way to introduce children to the joy of reading.
Throughout school we strive to encourage a rounded approach to reading where phonics skills are applied to increase fluency and improve comprehension. Our reading books are levelled to match the progression in phonics in order to offer children a range of fiction and non-fiction texts to challenge them at an appropriate level to ensure accelerated learning
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Parents are partners in their child’s educational journey and are invited to phonics workshops. These sessions are used to support parents in gaining knowledge and understanding of how phonics is taught so that they have the skills to support phonics and early reading and writing at home.
The process of teaching a new phoneme reflects the following structure;
FOUNDATION STAGE 2 EXPECTED CHILD
At Whiston Worrygoose we adopt a mastery approach to teaching phonics. Children are taught in whole class groups and supported to access the age appropriate teaching content. The pace of the programme is maintained, with four new phonemes and a selection of 'Tricky words' introduced each week.
Children are taught the banks of 'Tricky' or common exception words aligned with Letters and Sounds. Their developing phonics knowledge enables them to sequentially build up their store of words to become fluent and confident readers.
Children are taught to use phonics as the approach to decoding an unfamiliar word.
Children are taught how to apply their phonic knowledge independently and are provided with opportunities to practise and consolidate their skills in both reading and writing.
Every classroom has a high quality reading area with a selection of books including old favourite stories and new and bold award winning texts.
Pupils in EYFS and Year 1 have an additional guided reading session 3 times a week which lasts for 30 minutes and aims to further build fluency and early comprehension skills. Pupils also have further time built into the week to read 1-1 to an adult.
Beyond Fluency - Teaching Reading Strategies
Every child in Year 2- Year 6 experiences a reading lesson each day that focuses on developing understanding and comprehension. We want pupils to become expert readers capable of making complex comparisons between authors and understanding language choices. Our daily lesson focuses heavily on exposing pupils to challenging Tier 2 vocabulary. We follow a similar structure in each classroom which is based on the principles of our overall teaching model consisting of
1 Teach Simply
2 Feedback well
3 Practice Regularly
Our process of choosing the books we teach in each year group is not random. We consider what we are teaching in reading to be every bit as important as how we are teaching reading. Each class book is designed to capture the interests of the children and helps sequence the way we introduce knowledge in other curriculum areas. This is the qualitative aspect of the way we select a book. We also consider the quantitative aspect of the book by using the lexile framework to evaluate the reading demand, analyse the text's semantic (word frequency) and syntactic (sentence length) characteristics.
We then craft a teaching sequence through the book based on 8 key domains. We continue to develop fluency through adult modelling and track children's fluency through the multi dimensional fluency framework.
Developing a Love of Reading
Developing a love of reading is vital. We have a high quality library which is well stocked with both fictiona and non- fcition texts. All classes are provided with weekly time to explore the library,
In addition we place a great deal of importance on story time. This takes place each day adn we choose a variety of books designed to foster curiosity and interest, Within each year group collection we always introduce children to one 'classic' author and identify at least one text which is designed to develop cultural capital.