Intent

At Alston Lane, we believe that reading is a master skill which creates opportunities for our pupils to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. We aim to create successful, fluent readers who read to gain information and for pleasure.  We are committed to exposing children to a rich and diverse reading curriculum and strive to instil a passion for reading in pupils, which they will continue develop throughout their education and in later life.  

Implementation

Phonics

Early reading and writing are underpinned by high quality phonics teaching from an early age.  At Alston Lane we follow the Letters and Sounds systematic synthetic phonics programme starting when our children enter the nursery. Throughout the Early Years and KS1, phonics is given high priority and taught daily. Teachers are skilled at teaching and assessing phonics and timely interventions are used to help children keep up rather than catch up.  

Shared reading / Core stories

Shared reading takes place during the reading phase of our English units from Year 1 through to Year 6. Texts used for our English units are challenging yet age-appropriate to offer the greatest opportunities for vocabulary development. During these sessions, the teacher will model word reading skills and following modelling, the children will participate in chorally reading aloud to practise these word reading skills. In addition, the teacher will model strategies in order to develop understanding of the text, focusing on prediction, literal retrieval, inference, sequencing and exploring vocabulary.  In our Early Years setting weekly core stories are used to immerse the children into the world of reading.  These books are selected due to their rich vocabulary to enable us to close the vocabulary gap at an early age.  During core story time, teachers will model word reading skills and develop children’s understanding of the story across the week.

Guided reading

Guided reading starts when children enter Key Stage 1 and continues throughout Key Stage 2.  Teachers are skilled at assessing children’s reading ability, ensuring they are grouped appropriately and are reading a book closely matched to their ability. For early readers, guided reading books are matched to their phonic ability but for developing and fluent readers our reading offer is more diverse. Teachers model specific reading skills including word reading and comprehension and they are skilled at listening to individual pupils during this time to monitor their reading and provide support.