Reading is at the heart of everything we do at Buckton Fields Primary School. Our aim is to ensure every child is able to read fluently, have a love of stories and books and are able to articulate what they have read. Throughout our school, we promote a love of reading through reading corners in our classrooms and in our multiple reading sheds which include: adventure, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, fairy tales, fact and poetry shed. We have story time at the end of the day to share stories with our children, develop their understanding of new vocabulary and embed comprehension skills. Our classrooms are language rich environments, which supports reading further. We provide a huge breadth of texts and reading experiences, including reading for pleasure books to encourage our children to become confident readers, who enjoy getting lost in a book.
Phonics
The emphasis on reading starts at the very beginning of Early Years, where children learn to decode through our phonics scheme: Essential Letters and Sounds.
Phonics takes place everyday in Early Years and Year One and it is an important part of our day. During phonics, children work through the phases to learn sounds, practise sounding out and blending and reading and writing words, applying their learning to sentence reading. Interventions are delivered to individual children to support them with their phonics and consolidation of sounds. During the school year, we provide phonics and reading workshops for our parents to learn about how we teach phonics and how to support with reading at home.
As part of our Literacy lessons, we teach reading into writing, where our children explore a type of text through reading lessons to build their knowledge and understanding to support writing. During reading lessons, children are taught the fundamental skills relating to reading and comprehension. In every year group, we have Class Reads, which are recommended reads for each year group. These special books are shared with our children, they support with comprehension, language development and are there to be enjoyed as a whole class. Every child also has access to a range of books in their classroom, which they can read independently or share with a friend. We ensure that our children are exposed to a range of quality texts including fiction, non-fiction, poetry and books by familiar authors.
From Early Years, children bring home a reading book, which is pitched at their level and relates to the sounds they are learning in phonics. We encourage our children to build confidence and fluency with reading by re-reading their school book both at school and at home. To support a love of reading and stories, children also bring home a Reading for Pleasure book which they choose themselves and can share with their family at home. This book may be above their reading ability and is changed weekly.
We want our children to enjoy reading, recognise their own progress and become confident, fluent readers. We believe the ability to read opens up a whole world of imagination and information to support our children to flourish.
Reading is the gateway for children that makes all other learning possible. – Barack Obama