Reading
Reading:
At Travis St Lawrence, we recognise that reading for pleasure makes a big difference to a child’s educational performance and helps them develop a broader vocabulary, increased general knowledge, confidence and a better understanding of the world around them. Children begin school with a concentrated and systematic teaching of phonics which follows a carefully planned and tightly structured approach through the use of the Read, Write Inc programme and Freshstart for older readers needing to catch up more rapidly. Pupils are given opportunities to apply what they have learnt through reading – including time to read aloud to adults to practise their decoding skills and comprehension of what they are reading. As children leave these earlier programmes, they are introduced to ‘Cracking Comprehension’ which focuses on the teaching of key reading skills, such as inference and retrieval, in a range of fiction and non-fiction texts. Our teachers supplement this with a variety of exciting reading sessions linked to current topics over the course of the year, providing children with the practice and experience they need to tackle more complex questions and themes in more challenging texts as they progress through Upper Key Stage Two.
As you walk around our school, you will see that our reading culture and ethos is really helping to create the ravenous, lifelong readers that we want our children to become.
We ensure that we follow the new reading framework to celebrate reading.
Please click the image below for the new reading framework.
A love of reading...
All children will go to our school library once a week and bring a 'bedtime' book home. These will help develop vocabulary and also instill a love of reading within children. Please take time to share these as a family and enjoy! See below for some tips on how to share these books.
Staff are early reading experts...
All relevant staff, from nursery to KS2, have been trained in RWI phonics. The Reader Leader has led training for staff, including coaching and team teaching, where required.
How can parents get involved?
Involving families is an important part of our reading culture. Results of international reading studies have shown that children who are supported in their reading at home are more likely to enjoy reading and tend to achieve more highly at school. We want our children to read at home through choice. For this to happen, we engage with families to extend the culture of reading that the school has developed. Strategies include:
- Parents and grandparents regularly volunteer come in to school and listen to children read.
- We offer advice and printable materials on our school website, along with input from individual class teachers on dojo and open evenings.
- Each class has a display to motivate pupils to read regularly at home.
- Our school target is for children to read at least three times a week.
- All pupils regularly take home a RWI phonics book that is matched to their phonics ability and a book for pleasure. When children move off the RWI programme, they are moved onto our colour banded system.