What does Reading look like at South Wonston Primary School?

At South Wonston Primary School, we believe that reading is integral to a child’s understanding and their appreciation of the world around them. We aim to inspire and foster a love of reading which will support our pupils long after they have left primary school. Reading is woven throughout our entire curriculum, and allows our children to see and experience things beyond what they already know; to develop their understanding of different cultures and be able to celebrate diversity whilst also developing a vocabulary to effectively express themselves. 

We strive for all of our pupils to become fluent readers and use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds phonic programme in order to achieve this. These early reading skills are then built upon through a wide range of reading experiences and activities to develop reading for pleasure including: quality texts used within English and Guided Reading sessions (following the CUSP curriculum which promotes comprehension skills, confidence and stamina); ‘bumping into books’ within the school environment and throughout the wider curriculum; school, class and online library offerings; opportunities to enjoy listening to and discussing class texts and story times; as well as theme days and special activities throughout the year to promote a love of reading.

Reading Intent
Through fidelity to the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme; the teaching of core reading strategies using our bespoke CUSP curriculum and the wider reading offering, our aims are for pupils to:
•    Build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.
•    Be equipped to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read.
•    See themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose.
•    Read with prosody and expression in order to establish meaning. 
•    Develop their confidence, fluency and stamina for reading.
•    Engage deeply with texts, showing a thorough comprehension of what they are reading.
•    Develop understanding of an extensive range of diverse texts which cover a range of relevant social issues, big ethical questions and moral dilemmas.
•    Develop their receptive and expressive language, including tier 1, 2 and 3 vocabulary, through the texts that they are exposed to. 
•    Develop a love for reading whereby they want to read widely and often, for both pleasure and information.
•    Appreciate Britain's rich and varied literary heritage.

Reading Implementation

Little Wandle:

At South Wonston Primary School it is important that we get children reading as quickly as possible because we all believe it is one of the most important skills a child will learn. We also want to instil a love of reading from the very first moment they join our school, which is why we focus a lot of time and attention on reading in the Early Years. We start teaching phonics in Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code and mastering phonics; teaching children the GPCs (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence) in isolation as well as within words and sentences so that children have to apply their understanding in order for children to be able to blend their taught GPCs to read as well as segment words to spell.
  
Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1:
We teach phonics for 20 minutes a day, learning a new phoneme each day. In Reception, we build from 10-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 secure their understanding and help children become fluent readers.
 
Children make a strong start in Reception: teaching begins in Week 2 of the Autumn term. We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised expectations of progress:
•    Children in Reception are taught to read and spell words using Phase 2 and 3 GPCs, and words with adjacent consonants (Phase 4) with fluency and accuracy.
•    Children in Year 1 review Phase 3 and 4 and are taught to read and spell words using Phase 5 GPCs with fluency and accuracy.
•    Any child who needs additional practice has keep-up support.
•    We timetable daily phonics lessons for any child in Year 2 or anyone in KS2 who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the Phonics screening check. These children urgently need to catch up, so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen. We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach these using the Rapid Catch up programme.
 
Teaching reading with Little Wandle:
We teach children to read through reading practice sessions three times a week. These:
•    Are taught by a fully trained adult to small groups of approximately six children
•    Use books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments and book matching grids
•    Are monitored by the class teacher, who rotates and works with each group on a regular basis.

Each reading practice session has a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory. The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills:
•    Decoding: lifting the words off the page
•    Prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression
•    Comprehension: teaching children to understand the text.

In Reception these sessions start in Week 4. Children who are not yet decoding have additional blending practice in small groups, so that they quickly learn to blend and can begin to read books.
In Year 2 and for anyone in KS2, we continue to teach reading in this way for any children who still need to practise reading with decodable books.
 
Home reading:
The decodable reading practice book is taken home to ensure success is shared with the family. Reading for pleasure books also go home for parents to share and read to children. We are exploring how to further support our pupils with an online offering for the Little Wandle phonic first books.
 
IMPACT: Assessment:
Children’s progress in phonics is continually reviewed through assessment. This is used to monitor progress and to identify any child needing additional support as soon as they need it.
Assessment for learning is used:
•    Daily within class to identify children needing keep-up support
•    Weekly in the Review lesson to assess gaps, address these immediately and secure fluency of GPCs, words and spellings.
Summative assessment is used:
•    Every six weeks to assess progress, to identify gaps in learning that need to be addressed, to identify any children needing additional support and to plan the keep-up support that they need.
•    By SLT and scrutinised through the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessment tracker, to narrow attainment gaps between different groups of children and so that any additional support for teachers can be put into place.
•    The Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised placement assessment is used with any child new to the school to quickly identify any gaps in their phonic knowledge and plan provide appropriate extra teaching.

Statutory assessment:
Children in Year 1 sit the Phonics screening check. Any child not passing the check re-sits it in Year 2.
Ongoing assessment for catch-up:
Children in Year 2 to 6 are assessed through:
•    their teacher’s ongoing formative assessment
•    the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds placement assessment and the appropriate half-termly assessments.

CUSP Reading curriculum:
•    In Reception, children take part in a daily structured story time which involves unpicking vocabulary, some oracy/drama and discussing some thinking questions relating to the text. The text is then explored in continuous provision.
•    In Years 1-6, children take part in scaffolded CUSP lessons where they are taught explicit vocabulary instruction, deliberate fluency instruction and explicit teaching of comprehension strategies. 
•    Lessons focus on the key reading skills: summarising, retrieval, inferencing and predicting. Explicit modelling using the ‘I do, we do, you do’ teaching model based on Rosenshine’s teaching principles guides and supports all children effectively. 
•    A range of reading techniques are used within lessons to support children’s reading development: echo reading, choral reading, ghost reading and paired reading.
•    All lessons are focused on rich, diverse, good quality core texts combined with relevant fiction and non-fiction extracts (significant authors, heritage texts, BAME author/protagonist, strong female role model or specific social, ethical, moral issues. Throughout each two-week block learning journey, children pull together and make links between the core texts, extracts and what they already know. 
•    The CUSP reading spine on the website allows both parents and children to be aware of the high quality texts that are covered in each year group and provides suggestions for age appropriate books to read at home should they wish.
•    Within reading lessons and through 1:1 reading, struggling readers are identified and bespoke interventions are put in place (Little Wandle Fluency readers, Rapid Reading, Precision teaching, daily additional reading). 
 
The wider reading offering:
•    Across the school, we hold a range of themed days/weeks and activities every year: Storytelling Week, where teachers choose engaging and high quality texts for children to build on their oracy and story telling skills; World Book Day, where purposeful activities are planned to celebrate and share children’s favourite books/characters; the Scholastic Book Fair, which promote and encourage a love of reading through rewards to buy new books of their choice; author visits/online workshops to inspire children; reading cafés where parents and carers are able to attend and read with their children and paired reading opportunities where each class pairs up with a class of a different key stage to share books of their choice. 
 
•    Children are read to each day by their class teacher. This could be a book that the teacher recommends to the class, the CUSP text or a recommendation from the class. 
 
•    High quality texts are provided in each classroom’s reading area, in the coloured book band library as well as in the school library. Children have a daily opportunity to read quietly and can change their reading book when needed. Each class visits the library once a week and children are allowed to borrow a text. We are in the process of setting up SORA which is an online reading library.

Impact:  How do we assess in Reading?

Formative assessment of children’s progress in reading takes place daily as Assessment for Learning, whereby the teacher continually adjusts learning through support and extension.  A summative assessment judgement is made against national expectations in reading each term in Years 1 to 6. In KS1 this is done through teacher assessment, supported by Little Wandle assessments and an annual standardised reading test (unless this is required on a termly basis to track progress). In KS2 children are assessed through both teacher assessment and standardised tests giving children the practise to apply their reading skills when faced with an unfamiliar text. In Year 6, children are also given the opportunity to look at and practise answering past SAT papers to support their knowledge and understanding.

Statutory assessments in Reading

In Year 1, children complete the Phonics screening check and in Year 6, children complete one reading paper as part of their end of KS2 Standardised Assessment Tests (SATs).

Monitoring of the teaching and learning of reading takes the form of learning walks, book looks and planning sampling, as well as conversations with teachers, pupil conferencing, and through interrogation of the data as leaders and with class teachers during pupil progress meetings. Impact is also measured through end of key stage assessments in EYFS, Year 2 and Year 6 and end of year data collection in all other year groups. Children who are not on track are closely monitored and provided with a range of 1:1 or small group interventions to address gaps in their learning.

How you can support your child with reading:

Little Wandle Parents Page: https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/

50 recommended reads for each year group: https://www.booksfortopics.com/booklists/recommended-reads/