Reading
At Oxclose Primary Academy we value reading in all subjects and believe our pupils should be given opportunities to develop their reading skills through a wide range of high quality texts and genres.
Throughout their time in our school we want pupils to develop a love for reading alongside an opportunity to develop skills such as inference, prediction and retrieval. We feel that it is extremely important for our pupils to learn in a vocabulary rich environment and we aim to embed this in our Reception class, continuing through Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2.
Reading for Pleasure
At Oxclose Primary Academy, we believe all children should be given opportunities to enjoy reading and this starts with our youngest children in Reception. As soon as our pupils start school, they are exposed to lots of engaging, exciting books and stories. Each class takes part in a daily ‘Share a Story’ session where a new book is chosen either following the children’s interests, linked to current issues or following on from learning in the classroom. This has quickly become one of our favourite times of the day, where we can all stop what we’re doing and immerse ourselves in a great book!
Every week, each class spends some time in our school library where they can listen to a story or audio book or share a story with a friend.
Each class have designed their own book nook reading areas where children are invited to spend time to either read by themselves or with a friend – have a look at our different classroom areas.
We love to share what we’ve read and recommend books to others, so we’ve used our classroom doors to showcase all of the stories we’ve read across the year.
We don’t just stop at reading indoors... we have a fantastic outdoor area with tables and benches to read our specially selected outdoor books at playtime and lunchtime too!
Reading Books
We have an extensive range of reading books and each child receives a new book every week, which is changed on a Friday. We encourage our pupils to read the same book at least 4 times a week to build their fluency, comprehension and inference skills. Our Key Stage 2 pupils have a bookmark which is signed each time they read, and our Key Stage 1 pupils have a home diary which is signed when they read at home. Every Friday, we have a class book raffle where one lucky winner wins a book to take home and keep!
We have some fantastic reading buddies from our Year 5 and Year 6 classes who read with our Key Stage 1 pupils and stamp their reading dairy. Our pupils really enjoy this time together and it’s fantastic to see them supporting each other.
Phonics
At Oxclose, we follow Essential Letters and Sounds; a validated phonics scheme with clear progression. Our children start phonics as soon as they join our Reception class and continue through to Year 1. In addition to this, our Key Stage 1 reading books are matched closely to our phonics scheme and consolidate the new grapheme/phoneme learned in the week. Please take a look at some of the materials shared with parents/carers to support the teaching of early reading and phonics.
Reading Lessons
Our reading lessons focus on building fluency, clarification skills, questioning and comprehension skills.
In Reception and Year 1, all of our pupils read their reading book at least once a week with an adult in the classroom and they also take part in a group reading session on a Friday.
In years 2-4, our pupils have one group session a week and focus on reciprocal reading skills and in years 5 and 6, our pupils take part in whole class reciprocal reading lessons.
Support for reading at home
Key information is shared with parents to help them support their child/ren with reading at home. This could be in the form of information sent home, meetings in school or tips/links.
Some of these will be directly from school, see below:
This document provides key tips for parents.
Others will be directly from the Essential Letters and Sounds website, see below:
Essential Letters and Sounds Phase 2 soundsEssential Letters and Sounds Phase 3 sounds
