Reading

At Coston, we believe that reading is fundamental not only to education but to functioning fully in today’s society. It is a vital skill that we want each child to have successfully acquired by the time they leave school at the end of Year 6. Through being proficient in reading, along with speaking, listening and writing children develop communication skills for their educational journey, for their work or career in later life and for their day-to-day living. We want to promote a love of reading for pleasure and an appreciation of books of all genres.

Children who find it difficult to learn to read are likely to struggle across the curriculum, as reading is necessary in every subject. Children need to be fluent readers in order to be successful and make progress at secondary school. This in turn will aid their future progress into adulthood and can determine their job or career. Therefore, it is paramount for our children at Coston to be fluent readers by the end of Year 6, at the latest.

We develop children with the following essential characteristics to help them become highly effective readers who can read fluently for a specific purpose and who enjoy reading for pleasure. They: 

• use their past experiences and knowledge to understand a text
• can make informed predictions based on what they have read, know and understand
• monitor their understanding of a text by thinking about how and what they are reading and asking themselves questions to clarify their understanding
• raise questions before, during and after reading the text and are able to ask higher order questions to help them deepen their understanding of what they have read
• create mental images of the text or use graphic organisers to help them extract and construct meaning from the text
• search for the appropriate/relevant information to answer questions, define words and terms, clarify misunderstandings and inform their inferences and deductions
• bring together what is spoken (written) in the text, what is unspoken (unwritten) in the text, and what is already known by the reader in order to extract and construct meaning from the text
• restate the meaning of the text in their own words, different words from those used in the original text
• make a judgement about what they have read based on what they know and understand. They can express a viewpoint and give an emotional/analytical/aesthetic response to the content and style of the text read
• relate what they have read to what is already known and to their own thoughts and feelings. They compare what has been read to other texts and to the world around them

Reading Long Term Plan

Phonics

At Coston Primary School we use a validated systematic synthetic phonics programme for teaching phonics called Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills to children with the aim of them becoming fluent readers. Phonics is a strategy for reading and writing that helps children to learn to read and write quickly and skillfully.

Children in EYFS and KS1 at Coston Primary School are provided with engaging and interactive daily Phonics lessons. Children are given opportunities to apply their skills through follow-up activities as well as during their daily writing and reading activities.

Children have access to a wide range of reading materials, through schemes and library books, non-fiction texts and dictionaries.

We encourage parents to read with their children daily and we support parents by inviting them to attend parent workshops and encourage them to look at the ‘Parents’ section of the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised website, to watch the supporting videos and read the guidance provided. These strategies support parents in helping their children to read. At Coston we believe that a wide selection of books serves to motivate our children’s interest in reading. To this end, we are always increasing our provision of books and ensure that all children have weekly access to the school library.

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