St Augustine's Catholic Primary School

Inspiring reading is our passion.

Through reading in particular, children have a chance to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially, and spiritually. Literature especially plays a key role in such development. Reading also enables children both to acquire knowledge and to build on what they already know. We are committed to enabling our children to become confident, critical readers through our teaching and through their exposure to varied and challenging material. Stories, poetry, drama and media are used to encourage and motivate writing within the school.

Early Reading and Phonics
NB: A list of helpful links for parents can be found at the bottom of this page.

We teach early reading through the systematic, synthetic phonics programme, Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. Right from the start of Reception, children have a daily phonics lesson which follows the progression for Little Wandle Letters and Sounds and this continues in Year 1 to ensure children become fluent readers. In Reception, we also build upon the early foundations of phonics through listening games, stories, nursery rhymes and songs, both in taught lessons and through activities in continuous provision.

We teach phonics for 30 minutes a day. In Reception, we build from 2-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to the full-length lesson as quickly as possible. Each Friday, we review the week’s teaching to help children become fluent readers.

We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised expectations of progress, which is very clearly structured (please click here for the progression).

Four new phonemes and their corresponding graphemes are taught (GPCs) most weeks (with other weeks focusing on reviewing previous learning) and they are then used in the final lesson of the week to review the week’s learning. Children will also learn tricky words during these sessions.

In the Autumn and Spring term, Reception learn phase 2 and phase 3 GPCs and then will spend the final term learning phase 4.

Year 1 begin the Autumn term with 3 weeks of revision of phases 2, 3 and 4 before learning phase 5, which will be completed by the end of the year. Use of the programme helps prepare Year 1 children for the Phonics Screening Test, taken in the summer term.
Year 2 children begin the year by revisiting phase 5 and other previously taught phases to ensure all children are completely confident with applying these GPCs in both their reading and writing. At this point they will move on from the Little Wandle phonics programme.  

Assessment

Half-termly assessments are conducted throughout Reception and Year 1 to help inform future teaching and identify children who have gaps in their phonic knowledge. We use this information alongside daily assessment of learning withing the classroom to identify any children who are in danger of falling behind and provide the appropriate ‘Keep Up’ support.

Reading books

Children in Reception and Year 1 read Little Wandle’s fully decodable books with a trained adult at least 3 times per week during our ‘Reading Practice’ sessions. Children read the same book (matched to their progress) in each of the reading sessions, focusing on a different skill each time (decoding, prosody and comprehension). This helps pupils become confident, skilled readers. The children then take their books home to build their reading fluency and showcase their developing skills and phonetic knowledge to their parents/carers.

In addition to the books children read themselves, they also take home sharing books to promote a joy of stories and reading. Children throughout the school have regular access to the school library and can take out books to enjoy at home. Children in Reception and Year 1 also take home story sacks, consisting of books combined with toys, activities and props to allow them to have an immersive story-telling experience.

Once the children have completed the Little Wandle programme and their phonic decoding skills have become automatic enough to allow consistently fluent reading, they will continue their reading journey reading books from the coloured reading bands and be regularly assessed using PM bench marking.

Links for parents

Videos, teaching order and more from Little Wandle:

 https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/

Reading from Year 2 – Year 6

At St Augustine’s, reading is prioritised to allow pupils to access the full curriculum offer. With a strong start in Reception and Year 1, pupils’ word reading and spelling reading become more accurate and automatic as fluency develops. Reading comprehension strategies focus on the learners’ understanding of written text. According to the EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit, reading comprehension strategies are high impact as on average they help to increase children’s learning progress by around six months. Alongside phonics, it is a crucial component of early reading instruction. A wide range of strategies and approaches are used to develop reading, such as teacher led reading, choral reading, paired reading, repeated reading, and individual silent reading. Comprehension strategies are described and modelled before pupils practise the strategies; an emphasis on explicit vocabulary is crucial for our strong EAL cohort.

Promoting a love of reading

Evidence suggests that there is a positive relationship between reading frequency, reading enjoyment and attainment (Clark 2011; Clark and Douglas 2011) and is strongly influenced by relationships between teachers and children, and children and families (Cremin et al, 2009).

We organise allocated reading time in class, as well as going to our newly refurbished library. Teachers read to their classes a variety of genres during the year to expose children to non-fiction, fiction, poetry, newspaper articles, magazines, playscripts or folktale. An important factor in developing reading for pleasure, is choice. Our school is striving to offer a variety of genres and newly released books.

To promote reading and develop lifelong readers, we organise World Book Day, author visits, book swaps, and a Summer Reading competition. We have a mobile library on KS2 playground, newspapers are made available and regularly changed so that children can keep up to date with current affairs, and displays around the school are there to encourage children in reading a variety of genres. Most importantly, the teachers engage with pupils advising them and talking about books, and act as role models. In this way they can have a significant influence on attitudes. Parental engagement is also key and some support in helping children reading at home is offered on the following link:

St Augustine's Catholic Primary School - Reading