Reading at School
At St. Bernadette’s we want our children to become enthusiastic, engaged readers and to develop a life-long love of books. We introduce the children to a range of high quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry books through our whole-class, core-text approach to teaching Literacy, and during their weekly guided reading session.
In the early stages of reading, we teach children the concepts about print including 1:1 word matching, left to right tracking and that print carries meaning. We teach them how to gather meaning from pictures, how sentences are structured and how to decode words using phonic skills to check for accuracy. We place a great emphasis on comprehension and inference from the very early stages of reading.
Types of reading in school
Shared reading is an on-going approach to the teaching and development of reading each year group. In shared reading activities, children are taught the concepts about print, phonics skills, the impact of language and the authors’ intent, comprehension and inference skills during whole class work. Teachers will use ‘big books,’ class texts, comprehension materials, model writing and cross curricular opportunities to develop these skills.
Guided reading occurs at least weekly and gives all children the opportunity to read with their class teacher in a small group. The teacher will use these weekly sessions as an opportunity to be more specific in the reading skills individual children need to develop.
Individual reading occurs primarily in Early Years and Key Stage 1 each week where every child will read 1:1 with a member of staff (however, where children are not reading at age related expectations, opportunities to read with a member of staff individually each week are planned for).
Since January 2015 we have been steadily investing in a new range of reading materials to enhance the quality of resources we offer children. We have a new range of PM books to deliver guided reading sessions as well as Oxford Reading Tree and Project X books.