Reading

At Veritas, we believe that reading is fundamental in children becoming great communicators, thinkers and writers. We foster a passion for reading and encourage our children to love a wide range of books. We facilitate this by allowing children access to a stimulating library environment where they can choose from a huge variety of books and be able to read for pleasure in a reading rich environment. We carefully select our whole class texts for each year group, for reading lessons, that are challenging and are rich in vocabulary. We also ensure that children have daily opportunities for independent reading for pleasure as well as shared story time with the teacher at the end of the day.

What does teaching look like across the school?

Key Stage 1 Guided Reading

Here at Veritas Primary Academy we use Read Write Inc Phonics, a consistent, rigorous and dynamic programme that aims to teach EVERY child to read. Using synthetic phonics, children quickly learn to blend letter sounds together following a fun and effective programme.

Teaching

Phonics is taught 4 days a week for 30 minutes and each group is led by either a skilled teacher or teaching assistant. Children are exposed to a variety of high quality texts closely matched to their reading levels. This allows children to feel successful, thus becoming confident readers and re-reading and discussing these texts supports them to become fluent and expressive readers. When teaching reading skills we alternate different text types through non-fiction, fiction and poetry in order to promote a love of reading across our school.

In lessons pupils are taught to:

Decode letter-sound correspondences quickly and effortlessly, using their phonic knowledge and skills.
Read common exception words on sight.
Understand what they read.
Read aloud with fluency and expression.

Children are taught to understand what they read by focussing on the following 5 reading domains:

1) Draw on knowledge of vocabulary to understand texts.
2) Identify/explain key aspects of fiction and non-fiction texts, such as characters, events, titles and information.
3) Identify and explain the sequences of events in texts.
4) Make inferences from a text.
5) Predict what might happen on the basis of what has been read so far.

Assessing and tracking progress

We assess all pupils following Read Write Inc. Phonics using the Sound and Word Assessment test. We use this data to assign them to a level on the Read Write Inc. Phonics. This gives us a very good indication of how well they are making progress relative to their starting points. We do this for all pupils, whenever they join us, so we can track all of them effectively.

The Read Write Inc coordinator monitors pupil’s progress. No child is left behind to struggle. Along with the class teacher, the children’s results are recorded from the Sound and Word Assessments, which take place every half term. This data allows us to intervene in different ways. For instance, we quickly move pupils to another group if they are progressing faster than their peers. Those who continue to struggle receive targeted interventions in order to further support the development of their early reading skills.

What’s more, our staff are all Read Write Inc trained, therefore they are all skilled teachers of reading and support children in becoming confident and fluent readers.

Key Stage 2 Whole Class Reading

We carefully select our whole class texts for each year group, for reading lessons, that are challenging and are rich in vocabulary. We also ensure that children have daily opportunities for independent reading for pleasure as well as shared story time with the teacher at the end of the day.

Our bespoke ‘love for reading’ reading policy follows a structured process to ensure that children are equipped with all the skills and strategies that they need to become, fluent, avid, and comprehensive readers. Our policy ensures that children engage with high-quality reading and ensure that ‘book talk’ is at the heart of our lessons. We believe that children should be reading at length and engaging in high-quality dialogue between their staff and peers to fully immerse themselves in a book.

Not only does our policy directly teach the key reading domains but it also ensures that the children master key reading strategies and deepen their understanding of the core values.

In key stage 2, we have three whole class reading sessions a week, focusing on the KS2 reading domains:

Content domain reference
2a – Meaning of words	give / explain the meaning of words in context
2b - Retrieval	retrieve and record information / identify key details from fiction and non-fiction
2c - Summarise	summarise main ideas from more than one paragraph
2d - Infer	make inferences from the text / explain and justify inferences with evidence from the text
2e - Predict	predict what might happen from details stated and implied
2f – Meaning as a whole	identify / explain how information / narrative content is related and contributes to meaning as a whole
2g – Word Choice	identify / explain how meaning is enhanced through choice of words and phrases
2h - Compare	make comparisons within the text

End of day story time

Every class across the school are timetabled to have a shared story at the end of each day. This is to end the day calmly, promote reading for pleasure and to enhance children’s reading by allowing them to access additional texts during the end of day story time sessions, in addition to those that they read in reading sessions and their own chosen books from the library.

Lexia

At Veritas we have targeted our pupil premium and SEND children in particularly across the school to undertake 3 x weekly Lexia core5 reading interventions.

Lexia® Core5® Reading supports educators in providing differentiated literacy instruction for students of all abilities (R–Y6). Lexia’s research-proven program provides explicit, systematic, personalised learning in the six areas of reading instruction, targeting skill gaps as they emerge, and providing teachers with the data and student-specific resources they need for individual or small-group instruction.

Library

Here at Veritas, In order to create a stimulating and inspiring place for children to want to read we carried out a complete renovation of our school library. This offers children a vibrant and exciting space to nurture their love of books! All classes have allocated library sessions throughout the week as well as reading corners in each classroom. We have fully stocked our library with reading books for pupils of all ages and reading abilities to offer something for everyone.

Take a tour around our lovely library ...

Chapter books

Here you will find all our high quality and engaging chapter books, organised in alphabetical order by author ...

Miss B's recommended reads

In this section of the library, you will find a diverse range of fiction and non-fiction books that I have recommended in my termly newsletters to parents and children. These are organised into picture books, key stage 1, lower key stage 2 and upper key stage 2.

Bookflix

Our 'Bookflix' display showcase 100 books that the children should aim to read by the time they leave Primary School. The children can take a checklist at any time to keep log of what books they have and haven't read yet.

Themed areas

In our library, we have many seating areas where the children can come and read for pleasure - two of our more popular areas are the themed 'Harry Potter' and 'Tree house' areas.

Non-fiction books

Here you will find a vast range of non-fiction texts sorted into categories ...

Banded books

Those children who are not yet free readers will be able to find their banded books to choose from in this section according to their BM benchmark level.

Termly newsletter display

On this display, you will find our termly reading newsletter ...

Reading bookworm display

This display shows what the purpose of every child's reading bookworms are and how it links to their home school diaries as well as information about how to earn stars and dots from reading at home in order to attend end of term 'reading parties'. The display also states who the class winner is each term for collecting the most gold stars each term collectively as a class for reading at home.

Whole class stories display

For World Book Week this year, each class had to create a whole class story. The winning class got an exciting prize and each classes story has been proudly displayed in the library for all to read ..

Reading Cloud

We use 'Reading Cloud' book scanning system to log what books the children have taken in order for staff and parents to track children’s reading. This also helps us to understand what books children are enjoying at home. Children can use the reading cloud platform to blog and review their books and so much more.

Home School Diaries

Home school diaries are integral part of ensuring that the children are reading daily. Daily reading has a huge impact on children’s learning. It enables them to become fluent and expressive readers and to comprehend a range of texts. It also builds children’s imaginations, creativity and vocabulary banks. These are the building blocks to help children to become strong, creative writers.

The expectation is that children will read at least 3 x per week, although we strongly encourage that children should read 5 or more times per week for optimum impact. To encourage children to read, every class from Nursery to Year 6 have bookworm displays in their classroom. If the children read 3 or 4 times a week, they receive a coloured dot on their book worm. If a child reads 5 or more times a week, then they will receive a gold star. At the end of each term, those children who receive a certain amount of gold stars, will attend a reading party as a reward for fantastic reading.

We also have a class reading trophy which is given each term to the winning class who have collected the most gold stars collectively for reading at home.

Reading Newsletters

Each term, our English Lead creates termly reading newsletters to update staff, parents and children about all things reading related that are happening across the school, termly competition information, recommended reads as well as important reading related information etc...

Class Journals

Here at Veritas each class throughout the school has a reading class journal. Each week a child takes the journal home and creates a double page spread where they create a beautiful piece of artwork accompanied by a book review to recommend a high quality book that they have read to their peers. This is showcased to the class each week. Here are some examples from children in each year group, as well as a selection of our teacher WAGOLLs.

Teacher WAGOLLs

Children's WAGOLLs

Whole School Topics

To engage our children at the beginning of January after the Christmas break and welcome them back with excitement a positive attitude, we embark upon a stimulating whole school topic. Our whole school topic is always based around a high-quality text, in which our reading, writing and art lesson are all focused around this book (we also make links with other wider subjects dependent on whether links can be made). To give the children a spring in their step, they are welcomed my a memorable experience to really hook them into the topic ...

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