Phonics and Reading

Reading is a skill and, as with every skill, it requires not just instruction but practice. Reading practice serves a number of purposes. It enables students to apply the skills and strategies that are taught; it provides opportunities to check student learning and identify weaknesses and it draws students into the world of “real” reading - a world in which people learn from and enjoy books.

Using the Horizons project enables us to build a large bank of books to ensure our children have to opportunity to be inspired and motivated to practice. Practice does not automatically lead to growth, however, to be effective, practice must have certain attributes: It must be at the right level of difficulty, cover a sufficient amount of time, be guided by the instructor, and be enjoyable enough to sustain.

To ensure we balance this, we are approaching independent practice using the following components:

Learning to read is the most important thing your child will learn at our school. Everything else depends on it, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible.  We want your child to love reading – and to want to read for themselves. This is why we put our efforts into making sure they develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read. 

At Oasis Academy Temple, we follow the Read Write Inc (RWInc) Phonics/Reading scheme. Read, Write Inc is a highly successful phonics programme for children aged 4 to 7 who are learning to read and write. It teaches children how to both decode and understand written language to become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. This is achieved by a dynamic approach to teaching phonics that is consistent across the school using the Read, Write Inc phonics resources and fully decodable reading books. 

Children are grouped according to their ability in Early Years and Key Stage 1 to ensure that teaching is matched to their level. Phonics in Early Years and Key Stage 1 takes place on a daily basis. Children in Key Stage 2 that still require phonics teaching, continue with a specially tailored programme (RWInc) to meet their individual needs.  

Shared Reading forms part of the daily phonics lessons and is led by the reading teachers. Each child reads for at least 15 minutes every day, in a small group with their phonics teacher. All texts are linked to the child's phonic ability. Children enjoy one book per week and learning activities support accurate and fluent reading to facilitate comprehension. In addition, children take fully decodable reading books home to further practice skills learnt at school. These books are matched to each child's phonics ability and are closely monitored by the phonics teachers to ensure that children are reading books of an appropriate level.  

How will my child be taught to read? 

We teach the children phonics straight away in Reception. This means that they learn how to ‘read’ the (Phonemes) sounds in words and how those sounds can be written down (Graphemes). This is essential for reading, but it also helps children learn to spell well. 

We teach the children simple ways of remembering these sounds and letters. Once the children have learnt to blend accurately, they start to read with fluency. This is achieved through speedy reading of individual words and repeated reads of their shared reading books. 'Tricky words' such as 'once' 'said' 'the' are not phonetically decodable and these are taught explicitly as part of the reading session and we call them ‘red’ words.   

To develop the children's love of stories, we have dedicated story time, across all Key Stages. The teachers read to the children, introducing them to a variety of stories, poetry and information books - and authors. They acquire new vocabulary through our word aware teaching, which focuses on embedding new words into their autographic memory.  

Children who join the School throughout the year are quickly assessed in phonics and grouped according to their ability. Children in Early Years and Key Stage 1 are assessed and regrouped every half term to ensure they receive the correct level of support and challenge. If children are not where we would expect them to be at certain points in the year, they will have daily extra phonics practise to secure progress.  

We value a broad, balanced and reading rich curriculum that includes reading with, reading by and reading to children. By protecting time every day, to read aloud to our children they will have the opportunity to hear and respond to great stories written by some of the most highly acclaimed literacy authors.  Not only that but, research also demonstrates that reading to children develops empathy - meaning reading aloud to our children will not only make them better readers, but also better people. We cannot think of a better gift for our students and the world.

Our canon of texts has been carefully selected because they are books that are ‘worth reading’. They will inspire a love of reading, ensure that our children are exposed to high-quality literary language, will widen and deepen their personal word-hoard, develop cultural capital, enrich character and empathy and prepare them not only for the demands of future curriculums but also a fulfilling literate life.

The focus for sharing reading in this way is pleasure and enjoyment. However, during read alouds there will sometimes be an additional focus for teaching.  This might be modelling how phrased and fluent reading should sound, vocabulary development, word-analysis, deepening layers of meaning, questioning and critical thinking, and knowledge and understanding of the world. During read alouds the aim for the teacher is to read the story with as little interruption as possible but sometimes, the teacher might pause to explain what words mean, explain new and unfamiliar concepts, ask questions (both teacher and children), visualise what is happening or summarise a main point or idea. All stories will be read from beginning to end to ensure that within this part of our curriculum, children can engage in the whole story. This means that sometimes the texts stand alone, sometimes they are continued from our literature spine and sometimes they are continued from guided comprehension.

For younger children, a range of high-quality picture books will be read a number of times so children can join in with repetitive refrains, rhythm and rhyme. The journey will then continue with short novels moving into longer novels for older children which is why you will see less texts to choose from at this stage of development.

We deliberately choose texts which open a window on the world, using centres and badges of excellence including CLPE, The Carnegie and Kate Greenway Medals and recommendations from Children’s Laureates from the last decade. Each text links with and compliments the Oasis Primary Curriculum, enabling children to re-visit particular favourites and engage in author and poet study. The literature is mapped and planned to tell different stories from different people. Every term we include: classics; poetry; picture books for all ages; books that are written by and tell the stories of black and global majority communities; working-class voices; stories which make disability visible; that highlight different family types, LGBT and gender issues; and reflect the realities of the diverse communities we serve.

Teachers will be given both support and freedom to explore, interrogate and make links between the texts chosen. We will offer suggested question stems and domains of reading to pick up on. We also realise that different children will have different needs so will provide a frame work but not prescriptive sessions.

Our goal for teaching reading comprehension so explicitly is to enable all of our children to understand the most demanding texts, interpret them and understand the deeper layers of hidden meaning. When readers are able to do this, then every reading context is pleasurable and readers read more and more. To achieve this our children need to know and understand that reading is active, requires effort and cognition and that effective readers apply a range of strategies in combination, subconsciously to read with understanding.

It is well evidenced that reading comprehension can be improved through the explicit teaching of specific strategies to support pupils to monitor their own reading and overcome barriers to reading for meaning. Specific strategies include predicting, asking questions, summarizing, clarifying and activating background knowledge and when used in combination enable the outcome skill of inference making – understanding the deeper layers of meaning.

To enable all of our children to read actively and apply these strategies whenever they read independently our reading curriculum includes time protected daily for explicit strategy instruction and modelled and supported practice. To enable pupils to practice, a range of quality text extracts, chosen from reputable resource banks including The Literacy Shed have been selected because they provide the opportunity for children to practice the strategies, broaden and extend vocabulary and fully utilize background knowledge to support inference making. We have chosen to follow the ‘VIPERS’ model – vocabulary, inference, prediction, explain, retrieve, sequence and summarised following a fortnightly cycle as this provides a structure required to teach pupils to integrate multiple strategies.

Text extracts are used rather than whole texts as these provide the focus for teachers to read loud and think aloud and for pupils to practice the strategies. Sometimes theses texts will be continued in Read Alouds, sometimes children will be encouraged to continue reading these stories independently and sometimes the texts are overlapped with our literature spine.