Teaching Reading at Kinderley

• We teach phonics and early reading skills using Read Write Inc.

• In our teaching we discuss elements such as:

• Digraphs: these are two letters making a single sound eg: ar, ee, ou etc.
  Trigraphs are three letters making a single sound eg: igh.
  A grapheme is a phoneme written down.

• Segmenting is where you break each word into its separate phoneme, for example ‘chop’ has 3 phonemes, ch/o/p. Blending is simply putting those sounds back together to form a word. Children will use their 'Fred Fingers' to help them with this.

• Some words in the English language cannot be broken down into separate phonemes. These words are known as tricky words and we teach the children to be able to read and know the whole word, for example, ‘said’ or ‘what’.

Reading Schemes

Once the children have completed the Read Write Inc programme, they will move onto reading books levelled on Accelerated Reader. We use a range of reading scheme books that are organised into AR levels so that the children experience a range of stories and text types. The children move through the books at a steady pace, often re-reading the books to ensure they have secured the vocabulary until they become a “free reader”. They can choose books from the school’s well stocked library to read in school and at home; selecting a book is supported where possible by an adult who knows their confidence and challenge level as well as their interests.

The children also have opportunities for group or whole class guided reading sessions in class when they read a text that is often a little more challenging than one they would read alone as the adult supporter can scaffold their learning and help them to develop reading skills of a higher standard.

It is vitally important that the children read daily for a few minutes, preferably to an adult. Sometimes it is hard to think of questions you can ask whilst you are hearing your child so we have attached a document that might give you some ideas:

Assessment

• We assess children regularly to monitor their progress in phonics and reading.

• We put interventions in place where children aren't meeting year group expectations, in consultation with parents/carers.

• We use Accelerated Reader when a child is a fluent reader, to assess their understanding of a text through an online quiz. This gives us a standardised reading score and allows us to track a child's progress in reading.

• We test children termly using the NFER Reading test in Year 2-6, which provides a standardised score and allow us to track children's progress and adapt our teaching to 'diminish gaps' to ensure children make further progress.