At Goring Church of England Primary School, we have a passion for reading. We recognise the transformative impact that being a confident reader can have on a child’s learning. Furthermore, research has shown how reading for pleasure is vital for academic success, mental health and later economic success. Our aim, therefore, is to help every child develop a life-long love of reading.
We aim to achieve this by ensuring children:
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- recognise the value of reading as a life skill
- become enthusiastic and reflective readers by introducing them to good-quality books, from a variety of cultures and in a range of different styles and formats
- understand a variety of text types including non-fiction, fiction, poetry and drama
- are confident, fluent, and independent when reading for different purposes
- reflect on and have an interest in what they have read and the language and punctuation choices made by the author
- use drama and role-play, where appropriate, to immerse them in the text
- have sound phonic awareness and use a phonics first approach to reading
- have a range of strategies to use in order to read and comprehend texts
Children have a range of opportunities to read during the school day. These include:
- individual reading – 1:1 reading with an adult
- shared reading – whole class reading the same text together
- guided reading – reading in a small group with an adult
- reading across the curriculum – reading in different lessons
- independent reading – having time to read a book of their choice
- class stories and story time – listening to a class story.
The foundation of learning to read is phonics, which is taught daily using the Phonics Shed programme. The children are taught the correspondence between letters and sounds using an interactive approach which includes songs, actions and stories. They are taught to read by recognising the sounds in a word and to blend them together to read the whole word. The children also learn how to segment words into sounds to learn how to write words. Each week, high frequency and tricky words are taught to enable the children to read these without the need to sound them out. The reading books that the children take home are carefully matched to the sounds and words they have learned to enable them to decode the text.
Parents can support their child’s 'reading journey' through regular reading at home. Reading to and with your child every evening for at least ten minutes can make a dramatic difference to their progress and achievement. If you would like some help choosing books for your child please use the websites below or ask your child's class teacher.
Useful Websites:
Oxford Owl has expert advice, top tips and activity ideas so that you can help your child with reading and maths.
Wordsforlife has lots of information about reading milestones, tips, fun activities for children to do and recommended reads for different ages.
Booktrust is the UK's largest children's reading charity. The website has an extensive range of resources and support to help develop a love of reading. It also has an excellent ‘Bookfinder’ which helps children to find the next book to read by entering their age and interests.
Reading Ahead is a national programme, run by The Reading Agency, which challenges you to choose six books to read, rate and review.
Yakbooks is a website full of book reviews written by children and adults. There is a very useful tool called ‘Bookchooser’, which allows you to search for different genres of books based on set criteria.
https://www.inclusivebooksforchildren.org/
Inclusive Books for children is a charity that aspires for mainstream children's books to be inclusive, and for inclusive children's books to be mainstream. The website is full of book recommendations for children aged 0-9.
Listed below are a selection of resources that you may find useful to help support your child’s reading.
