Reading at Oakwood
TALK FOR WRITING
Children foster a love of reading through our Talk for Writing process as it enables them to deeply engage with a variety of texts, both fiction and non-fiction. Children are able to interrogate the text and develop skills of retrieval, deduction and inferential thinking.
LOCAL LIBRARIES
Throughout the school there are small Local libraries located in corridors. These are stocked with age-appropriate books in a range of genres. Children are encouraged to use this resource for their class reading time and are given the freedom to choose a book that interests them.
INDIVIDUAL READERS
On a weekly basis, each child will be listened to by an adult within school. This can include group reading.
KS1 – 3 x a week
KS2 – 2 x a week
GROUP READING
This takes place every week for each group of children. The books chosen are at an appropriate level for the children, but also contain a challenge. A range of questions are asked during this session including retrieval, vocabulary and inference.
READING COMPREHENSION
Reading comprehension will be incorporated into T4W. In addition to this, on weeks when this is not the case, an additional Reading Comprehension lesson will be conducted using texts appropriate to the year group.
DAILY STORY TIME
It is important for children to be able to go on a journey with a story from beginning to end to help develop an enjoyment of reading but also to model how to read a story. Children will be read to daily with books that are appropriately aimed at the year group being taught and expose the children to rich vocabulary.
READING CHALLENGE
A reading challenge is conducted across the school to encourage children to read to their parents at home. This challenge can be either an individual or class challenge. When a challenge is completed a book is received by the winner (one of their choosing) and a certificate presented in an assembly as a celebration of their achievement.
PHONICS
At Oakwood, we are following Little Wandle.
‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) developed for schools by schools. Based on the original Letters and Sounds, but extensively revised to provide a complete teaching programme meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum, the Ofsted Deep Dive into reading and preparing your children to go beyond the expectations of the Phonics Screening Check’.
At Oakwood we teach phonics 5 x a week for 20 minutes following the Little Wandle programme.
At Oakwood we believe that reading is the foundation for learning. We believe that if we foster a love of reading children will have the tools they need to access all other areas of the curriculum and will be open to a world of opportunity.
Reading is at the heart of our teaching and learning curriculum. For all of our overarching topics we unlock the journey of learning with a collection of books. We use core fiction and non fiction texts to introduce our topics and we base our Talk for Writing sessions on these. These are age appropriate, vocabulary rich texts. We use supporting texts to further immerse the children in the topic they are learning. These include poetry and stories from other cultures.
We also teach at least 3 whole class reading sessions a week through the I go, we go, you go gradual release method to support reading at all abilities in class. All children are exposed to an age appropriate vocabulary rich text and we use reading VIPERS to teach the 6 domains of reading. Each week we begin the week focussing on tier 2 vocabulary as we believe this is such an important part of assessing the whole curriculum.
“Reading enjoyment has been reported as more important for children’s educational success than their family’s socio-economic status" (OECD, 2002).
We are all dedicated to ensuring that all children become confident, fluent readers. We want our children develop a love of reading and enjoy books as much as we do!