Lane End Primary School

At Lane End School, reading is taught in a variety of ways to ensure children acquire the breadth of skills to develop a love for reading.  Children have a wide range of reading opportunities through:

• Wide range of books and text types
• Whole class Guided Reading
• Accelerated Reader
• Daily Story time from Nursery to Year 6
• Reading across the Curriculum
• Reading Week
• Learning Cafe and Reading Cloud
• Whole school book focus in September
• Daily poetry time in EYFS and KS1 (Poetry Basket) 

At Lane End Primary, we value reading as a crucial life skill. By the time children leave us, they read confidently for meaning and regularly enjoy reading for pleasure. Our readers are equipped with the tools to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary. We encourage our children to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose.

Reading for Pleasure

Research indicates that teachers’ knowledge of children’s literature and other texts, as well as knowledge of young readers’ choices within and beyond school, is essential in order to use the four strands of Reading for Pleasure pedagogy. These are four specific practices, given below, that, combined, motivate children to choose to read and become frequent readers:

1. Reading aloud to, and with, children. This is in addition to reading aloud as part of literacy teaching. Reading aloud for pleasure enables children to access rich, challenging texts, offers a model for silent reading, prompts affective engagement and creates a class repertoire of ‘texts in common’ to discuss. We share stories with our children every day.

2. Informal book talk and book play. Talk about texts is essential to all literacy teaching, but this reader-to-reader talk is more informal, often spontaneous, and includes book-related play and recommendations.  Teachers model book recommendations and children then share theirs across the academic year.

3. Choice-led time to read. Children need time to read and be given support for making informed choices from a core set of texts that have been read to them, and from other texts that tempt them.  Children have the opportunity to revisit familiar books to read and enjoy in class.

4. Social reading environments. These are key to creating a strong reading culture. Successful environments invite readers to engage and share the pleasures of reading.

In addition to a daily 20 minute session of independent reading through Accelerated Reader, every class has a dedicated twenty minutes in their timetable for story time – a daily opportunity for children to enjoy being read to.

INDIVIDUAL READING BOOKS

Each child has a reading book to take home.  In Reception and KS1 this book will be phonetically decodable and will be closely matched to the child's phonic knowledge.  Books are matched closely to the validated SSP, Lesley Clarke's Letters and Sounds.  

Once children have finished the Phonics programme, they continue their reading journey through Accelerated Reader. 

Children complete a STAR reading assessment which identifies their ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development).  Children can select their own books from our Book Nook.  Once a child finishes their book, they then complete a quiz which assesses their understanding of the text.  Selected texts and quiz results are closely monitored by staff to ensure timely support is provided where needed.  Children are encouraged to read a range of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays.

For further parent information on Accelerated Reader, visit https://help.renlearn.co.uk/AR/ARParentGuide

GUIDED READING

Principles of Guided Reading

The key difference between hearing individual readers and using guided reading sessions is that Guided Reading is very much focused on the teaching of reading skills within word, sentence and text level. At Lane End Primary School, we teach whole-class guided reading sessions from Year 2 through to Year 6.  In Year 1, children work in small groups applying their phonic knowledge to decodable texts.

At KS1 the focus is more towards decoding, understanding how different genres of books work and reading words within a sentence.  In addition, there is a focus on fluency and automaticity.

At KS2, the focus shifts more towards comprehension and developing higher order reading skills across a range of genres.

In KS1, each guided reading session lasts approximately 20 - 30 minutes.

In KS2, Guided Reading is daily each session lasts 30 minutes. 

We follow the Whiteknights programme, Master Readers.  Throughout the week, we focus on fluency supported by guided oral reading and repeated reading.  Comprehension strategies are explicitly modelled.

The week runs as follows:

Monday - Shared Reading

Tuesday - Book Club

Wednesday - Comprehension - Modelled

Thursday - Comprehension - Assessed

Friday - Review

SHARED READING

This activity takes place throughout the day and across a range of subjects in the curriculum. A wide range of texts are shared with the whole class which is usually above the reading level of the children. The class teacher models using the reading skills that are taught in guided reading to reinforce and give purpose to the children’s learning.