Reading at School

At Our Lady of the Visitation, we want our children to become enthusiastic, engaged readers and to develop a life-long love of books. We introduce the children to a range of high quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry books through our curriculum, including our chosen class texts as a stimulus for the Process Approach to teaching English, and during their weekly guided or shared reading session.

In the early stages of reading, we teach children the concepts about print including 1:1 word matching, left to right tracking and that print carries meaning. We teach them how sentences are structured and how to decode words using phonic skills to check for accuracy. We place a great emphasis on language comprehension and inference from the very early stages of reading and across the school.

Types of reading in school

We have a range of ways that children conduct their reading practice – individual, group sessions and as a whole class.  We are introducing group reading in Reception and Year 1 where children will read with a member of staff.  Working closely with children regularly allows adults to continually assess reading skills and provide targets. Group reading gives all children the opportunity to read with their class teacher in a small group. The teacher will use these sessions as an opportunity to be more specific in the reading skills that children need to develop – decoding, prosody and comprehension. Where children are not reading at age related expectations, further support opportunities are planned for each week. 

Shared reading is an ongoing approach to the teaching and development of reading from Year 2-6. In shared reading activities, children have opportunities to develop a range of reading skills during whole class work, including phonics skills, prediction, summarising, the impact of high quality language, the authors’ intent. comprehension and inference skills. Teachers will use class texts during these sessions.  Children also develop skills further through cross curricular opportunities for reading in a range of subjects. 

Reading books

We have a range of different independent reading scheme books for pupils to choose from. Pupils are assessed on their independent reading and move through the book bands and phonetic decodable books for early years and Year 1.  As children move through the school, they can become free readers when they are confident, fluent and can understand the experiences in the reading scheme books,

We have also been steadily investing in a new range of reading materials to enhance the quality of resources we offer children in their classroom book areas and in our school library.  Upper KS2 pupils take ownership of developing good reading practice across the school through the role of librarians and reading buddies.

We encourage everyone to keep practising their reading every evening with an adult.