About Reading
Reading at Fullwood
At Fullwood, we recognise and value the importance of reading, not only as its own subject but also as the vehicle that opens the door to the rest of the curriculum. We endeavour for all of our children to leave KS1 being fluent readers with sound phonics knowledge to support their decoding, as well as developing their strategies around comprehending and reasoning texts and books that they read.
As children move through the school, the emphasis of learning to read is shifted into the understanding of reading to learn as teachers promote how solid reading skills can support learning in every other area of the curriculum. In short, we stop learning to read and start reading to learn!
At Fullwood, we follow the ‘GES Simply Letters and Sounds’ systematic synthetic phonics scheme to teach phonics to our children. This scheme is taught from Reception to Year 2 (and for older children where needed). We use the Ransom Decodable books alongside Big Cat Collins Books, which aligns with the scheme and allows children to practise the sounds that they are currently learning in class. The books are organised in phase bands and as children develop their reading skills, they will move through the different bands until they are ‘free readers’ and can choose to read any book they wish.
Quality first lessons using diverse key texts expose our children to a wide range of genres, including poetry, non-fiction and narrative, woven through our learning journeys. This means reading skills are taught through phonics, guided reading and individual reading sessions. These sessions focus on the decoding, blending, segmenting, comprehension and reading fluency including scanning skills.
Our philosophy around reading begins with reading for enjoyment. We use many strategies to support our children and parents/carers to value a good read and know that fun family time can be centred around a good book. Some of these include
- Reading Karate – A strategy used from Y1 to Y3 to encourage children and parents to read phonics decodable books together at home. Children achieve karate bands for a certain number of home reads each week. They move through the coloured bands until they read the Black Belt. Certificates are awarded for each band.
- Reading Journals – From yr 4- 6 children work through challenges per term. This focuses on the love of reading where children are encouraged to read a range of genres (e.g. a book of their choice, a book their teacher recommends, a non-fiction book, poem, etc). Once the children finish their book they complete 3 reading tasks around their book. If they read all books by a given date they take part in a reward.
- Book Swap – We have a selection of books available in different ranges for children to borrow. They can take a new book from the selection and return an older book from home that they have already read.
- Reading Scrapbooks – This is a modern way of sharing book reviews. Children write and illustrate a page together with their parents about a recent or favourite book they may have read. Classes share each other’s entries.
- Class readers – each teacher will choose and read a book together with their classes. These books are chosen with a view to expose children to a greater range of diverse books
- Library – We believe that all children should have access to high quality text. Once week, all children will visit the library and have the opportunity to borrow a high quality text to take home and share with their family.
