Reading at Blaise
At Blaise Primary and Nursery School, we believe that reading is an essential life skill and we are committed to enabling our children to become lifelong readers. Reading is the beating heart of our curriculum. At the centre of our strategy is our drive to foster a love of reading, enriching children’s learning with quality texts and activities, which develop understanding and imagination.
We know that early readers need two very separate types of teaching to become great readers. They need effective teaching of language comprehension through listening and speaking and to be taught to decode through phonics.
Communication and Language
A language rich curriculum underpins everything as one of the building blocks for reading. Staff understand how to scaffold and develop children’s communication through the quality interactions they have each day with them. Staff prioritise interactions with children and no longer spend time collecting evidence. Children are given plenty of opportunity to play, as we know that during play, talk is more prevalent. Children are given lots of time for back-and-forth talk, for example in plan and review time, and within the development of learning partners. ‘Hands up’ practice is avoided.
New vocabulary is introduced from stories or theme; this is developed by staff as secondary use within interactions too.
Phonics
At Blaise, we use Unlocking Letters and Sounds. This programme is a method of learning letter sounds and blending them together to read and write words. This is supported by a comprehensive scheme of reading books. In nursery, staff are very familiar with phase 1 and encourage learning around this. They have expert knowledge of further phonics too and use this within interactions to support children with interests in this area. Reception and Year 1 children have an interactive, daily phonics session working through the phonic phases. This is delivered to the whole class. Children who are not yet secure in the previous phonic phases will take part in additional intervention groups. In Year 2, children continue their phonetic journey until Term 2 when phase 5 is completed. Interventions for individual and groups of children continue throughout Year 2 and into Key Stage 2, where necessary, through the use of targeted teaching.
Phonics first Approach
Teaching phonics (the linking of letters or groups of letters with the sounds they represent) is the most reliable way to teach children to read. Children should not be encouraged to make guesses by looking at the pictures or from what might make sense. Once children are phonetically secure they will move to colour-banded books and then free readers.
Phonetic Reading Books - selection and fluency
We carefully matching children’s reading books to their assessed phonic level. Children will bring home a book that is nearly fully decodable for them.
Initially children need to be supported to point to each letter and say the sound it represents, before blending them together to read the word. This takes some time and therefore re reading several times will encourage automaticity and fluency. When children can read fluently they can begin to understand what they are reading.
With this in mind, children will be guided reading in school with staff, building fluency with the same book. In a guided reading session staff teach children new sounds and model skills, before hearing children read. In addition, a phonics home reader will typically be changed once a week to enable time for lots of re-reading and the development of their fluency. Our children love showing off their word-perfect reading!
Children also bring home a book to read for pleasure which will need to be read to them. This is a vitally important for supporting children’s developing language and comprehension skills.
Please find further information which you can view or download below.
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| learning to read at blaise.pptx | Download |
Reading Records
Every child will bring home their reading record alongside their reading books. Please sign and date in their record when they have read to you and add a comment if you would like.
We have different records for different years groups, please see below to make sure your child has the correct one.
Please see below for further phonics information
