Reading at Riddings

Intent

At Riddings Infant and Nursery School, we LOVE to read!

Stories and books are at the heart of everything we do and we hope that our children show you that when you visit our school. As a school, we believe that if we promote the love of reading, then our children will be eager and excited to learn the skills needed to master both word reading and language comprehension as well as value the importance of understanding and learning new vocabulary.

We believe reading is vital in providing our children with the ability to unlock all other areas of the curriculum, wider learning and future careers. Furthermore, without strong reading and comprehension skills children struggle to become independent, creative writers. Reading provides our children with vital opportunities to use their imaginations, escape the world around them, and encounter life experiences that may not normally be available to them.

A love of reading drives every member of staff in our school to offer a diverse and engaging curriculum for all our children. 

Our aim is to ensure each child leaves our school with the skills needed to become life-long lovers of reading.

Implementation

We use the systematic phonics scheme Read Write Inc. to deliver high quality early reading teaching to all the children in our school. For more information on this please see the Phonics section of our website (Click here for the Phonics information).

As well as teaching Read Write Inc phonics daily to master word reading, we also base our planning for the term around a quality text, allowing the children to become familiar with a range of different authors, themes, and genres throughout their time at Riddings.

We use our core text to choose a range of complimentary texts to share in our Whole Class Reading sessions, to allow us to delve deeper into a text and use our comprehension toolkit to answer and ask questions.

We also use a carefully created list of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to enjoy sharing quality texts in class on a regular basis. We call this our Riddings Reading Route. We especially enjoy "Favourite Fridays" where we get to choose one of our favourite books to read (no matter how many times we've read it before).

Each of our classrooms and outdoor areas have a cosy book corner to encourage our children to share books with each other; we have a special library where you can snuggle down on the sofa with a book and of course, we LOVE having stories read to us in class! 

We hold special events throughout the year to encourage a love of reading as well. These include a Bedtime Story event, pop-up reading corners, and celebrating World Book Day. You can see all the fun we have on these days if you go to the galleries section of our English zone (Click here to see our English galleries)

At Riddings, we follow the 'Read Write Inc' phonics scheme and assess children accordingly.  We understand that not all children work at this pace and we recognise that some children will need extra support in accessing reading throughout school. We have developed a supportive document to ensure that we are recognising where support is needed and also what we do as a school to make reading more inclusive for all learners.

Impact

Attainment in Reading is measured using statutory assessments such as the end of EYFS and Key Stage 1 frameworks, as well as outcomes in the Year 1 Phonics Screening check. Additionally, we track our own reading attainment through the use of RWI half termly and screening assessments, running records, comprehension exercises, and ongoing teacher assessment.

More importantly, we believe that Reading is the key to unlock all learning and so the impact of our Reading teaching and learning goes beyond the statutory assessments. We have high expectations for all our children when it comes to the mechanical process of reading and work hard to ensure all children have the best chance of leaving us fluent Year 2 readers. However, regardless of their decoding abilities, we give all the children the opportunity to enter the amazing new worlds that a book opens up to them and share texts from a range of cultures or genres to inspire them to question or seek out more for themselves.

Reading is a key route through our learning journey at Riddings and our main measure of impact is how passionately our children talk about books. By the time they leave us, our pupils can talk about a range of books that they have loved throughout their time at school, and how these have inspired them to think about the world differently. Just come to any Year 2 leavers assembly and you will hear the children describe the books they have loved as part of their happiest memories of their time at Riddings Infants. This is a fact we are very proud of!

Reading at Home

Reading regularly is vital to help develop your child as a reader. As part of our phonic and comprehension lessons, we hear our children read on a daily basis. We also hear individual readers on a one-to-one basis regularly throughout the week. 

To help your child as much as possible, we ask that you hear your child read at least 4 times a week at home (although every night would be the ultimate goal!). Each week, your child will bring home a new RWI Book Bag Book which matches specifically to your child's phonic knowledge in school. They will also have access to the RWI Storybook being covered in their phonic lesson on their Oxford Owl user, should you wish to read this with them too. Although it may seem odd at first, asking your child to re-read the same book several times, this is what makes them a confident reader! This helps them to build up the pace and fluency to understand the text and answer questions; it helps them to use expression, thinking about how the characters may be talking or feeling; it makes them feel confident in reading and gives them a can-do attitude as well as building their sight-word bank then more times they see certain words or phrases. 

Reading Rewards

To encourage as many children to read in school as possible, we give out raffle tickets to children who read at home! One read = one ticket, so the more times you read, the more tickets you get! The more tickets you get, the more chances you have of winning a prize!

At the end of each week, each class brings their raffle ticket box to our Star of the Week Assembly and we draw out a winner from each class! The winner gets a special certificate, some 'magic reading dust' and of course, a book to snuggle down with at home with their grown up!