Mayfield Primary SchoolReading: Vision & Overview
READING: VISION & OVERVIEW
Mrs Duerden
'ALWAYS START WITH WHY'
Our Vision For Reading
At Mayfield Primary School we strive to ensure that all of our children become successful, fluent readers by the end of Key Stage One and believe this is achievable through a combination of strong, high quality, discrete phonics teaching combined with a whole language approach that promotes a ‘Reading for Pleasure’ culture. We aim for all of the children at Mayfield, to leave school at the end of Key Stage 2 with a genuine passion for reading and to have obtained all of the skills they need to tackle any book of their choosing.
Reading is vital. Simple as that. One of the key achievements needed for life and definitely part of the skills you need for 'I Dream of Being...'. We have invested in, and established, a number of different methods and strategies to encourage regular reading including reading at home. We aim for as many children as possible to leave Mayfield meeting expected standards, or higher, in reading or at least having made sustained, strong progress from their starting point on entry. Here is a deeper look at some of these systems.
Early Reading In Our Early Years Setting
From the start of their school experience, children are immersed in a world of literature with books chosen to stimulate their imagination. The children are taught to tune into sounds which they hear in both the classroom and outdoor environment. They learn how to listen through story, games, rhymes and talk. Children are introduced to the conventions of books, reading from left to right, regarding the illustrations as an integral to the story, turning the pages singly etc. The use of stories and rhymes is key at this point. Children are encouraged to act out well known tales and join in with a repertoire of nursery rhymes. There is a very strong focus on listening to familiar stories and puppets and role play help to bring these alive. We provide a reading rich environment beginning with the children’s own names and including the use of captions, labels and instructions. To support reading at home. Two fully decodable books which have been already read with the adults in school are then sent home for the children to practice applying their phonic knowledge to their reading. Parents communicate with school through comments in a reading log. During the week, the children are encouraged to take the opportunity to choose a book with their family from our ’Race Across the World’ library. They also have continual access to our classroom books which match our phonics teaching and our daily reading practice sessions as well as carefully selected books which are linked to our carefully mapped out EYFS curriculum.
Early Reading In Year 1
As the children progress into Key Stage 1, they continue to develop and consolidate their growing knowledge of sounds or phonemes and their associated graphemes. Within a group, children are taught sounds in a lively and engaging lesson. They continue to read phonics books which contain the sounds they know so that they can read with increasing fluency. Children’s comprehension or understanding of the story is developed through multiple readings, making predictions, book discussions, retelling events and answering questions.
Supporting Early Readers
Children who are reading below the level expected for their age are identified through assessment and rigorously supported to make rapid progress. Children in KS2 who are new to English attend daily phonics lessons until they are able to decode texts accurately and read fluently. Regular phonics assessments track their progress throughout.
Reading: Years 2 to 6
At Mayfield, we teach reading whole-class from the point in Year 2 when the majority of children have successfully mastered the phonics programme. Once children can securely, confidently and fluently apply their phonic knowledge, whole-class reading lessons are designed to provide children with both breadth and depth in their reading experience and to ensure children are taught to comprehend a diverse range of appropriately and aspirationally pitched fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts written for a range of purposes.
From Year 2 to Year 6, each class has carefully chosen quality core texts called the Mayfield Reading Spine. This selection includes a range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry books. Our text-based approach focuses on further developing the pupils’ competencies and confidence in word reading and comprehension. Building on their early reading learning, we continue to teach our children to decode unfamiliar words and increase the number of words they can read on sight. We focus on comprehension and teach our children skills such as summarising, offering opinions, explaining use of language and layout, basic retrieval and making inferences under the fun and memorable manner known as our Reading Gang.
Having engaging and challenging core texts is one of the ways we encourage our pupils to develop the desire to read for enjoyment. Evidence from research shows that ensuring our children develop all the skills of language is essential to unlocking access to the rest of the curriculum. Therefore, opportunities to read, write and respond verbally are embedded across the curriculum. This approach also expands our children’s knowledge of the world in which we live. When children encounter words in their reading that they would rarely hear or use in everyday speech, we can teach our children that new vocabulary - which is why it is placed prominently and deliberately within the design and management of each subject area. We know that by explicitly teaching vocabulary, we will encourage our children to become interested and enthusiastic about words, keen to explore relationships among words and use them in a way that they come to ‘own’ the words.
Mayfield Reading Spine
Our Mayfield Reading Spine comprises a carefully-selected collection of texts which we commit to reading aloud, sharing, using extracts from, discussing, promoting and acting as a stimulus for performance and writing in each year group. We believe that all children have an entitlement to accessing challenging and appealing texts and in particular to hearing adults read engaging and challenging texts – often beyond the reach of independent reading for children in that year group. Each year, each class enjoy books that belong to one of the following categories: classic fiction, contemporary fiction, poetry, non-fiction, picture books and biographies so that children can develop a love of listening to, and enjoying, writing that goes beyond narratives.
The Mayfield Reading Spine contains a selection of books that are shared with the children in the following ways: Class Reader - Perform and Share (Extracts and Full Texts); Daily Reading Gang Sessions; Teacher’s Choice List; Library Recommended Titles; Texts as Stimulus for Writing Units; Race Across The World Reading Assemblies. Each classroom holds its own Reading Station, whilst we have established a brand new Race Across The World Library, which houses many of the texts and ideas. Each Reading Station and the Race Across The World Library contains books banded according to colour to assist children and adults in making choices about the texts they choose to read - these correspond with phonic stages as required. Across our fiction texts, we have identified six key themes: struggles and successes, freedom and captivity, exclusion and acceptance, good and evil, fear and courage and bonds and separation. These themes are discussed and explored so that children make connections between the books they read at school, as well as those they choose to read for pleasure. The Boot Room has been enhanced in recent months to accommodate a new library area containing books with themes that may appeal to our more reluctant readers. This developing range of reading matter is based in the indoor working area of our wider Boot Room provision.
Our selection of classic texts exposes children to some well-loved titles that belong to a respected canon of literature. A knowledge and appreciation of some of these key works provides our children with valuable cultural capital and important reference points for their enjoyment of other works of art. Our selection of contemporary fiction is, necessarily, regularly reviewed to ensure our offer reflects the very best of current children’s literature. Our aim here is to show our children the rich range of texts on offer to them in shops and libraries that may reflect current interests and issues and feel relevant and meaningful to them. Both classic and contemporary picture books are selected to meet these aims whilst also exposing the children to rich illustrations which enhance meaning. The poems we have selected are ones we share with our children many times with the goal of challenging children to learn them by heart. Repeated revisiting of the same poems supports retention and allows opportunities to explore patterns and language as well as internalising the rhythm and metre of the poems. We aim for these to be poems they carry with them in the long term. In each year, our children hear a biography or autobiography of a key figure read aloud to them. We also deploy football programmes, magazines and manuals within our Boot Room provision. Through these texts, we seek to provide our children with a diverse range of role models from past and present. In all parts of our reading spine, we have selected texts that are representative and diverse in both their characters and their author backgrounds so that the books can act as both a mirror in which the children see themselves reflected and a window to the wider world.
Our Mayfield Reading Spine is depicted in our Race Across The World Reading Maps. There is a map for each year group. The maps contains the full reading spine for each year group and a separate theme map as well. Reading rewards utilise our Race Across The World banner. You can find examples of the maps below.
The Reading Spine & Reading Gang Documents can be downloaded at the base of the page in PDF form.
How We Assess Progress In Reading
Children’s learning is assessed informally in each lesson and teachers plan responsively for next steps - often using the aforementioned strategies alongside the evidence displayed in books. These activities are also used at the end of a unit and help to provide evidence for summative judgements made using the Key Milestones Assessment Document.
Summative judgements are submitted formally twice a year, using the evidence gathered, stating whether each child is working at the expected standard, towards the expected standard, at greater depth within the expected standard or at a pre-key stage standard.
We use Reading Stations & The Reading Gang to aid memory retention. The most frequently used strategy is our Brain Gym opportunities which are devised to hold some of the activities highlighted above but above all else as a planned opportunity for daily review.
Children are listened to read on a regular rota with their class teacher, which forms a central part of the assessment process.
How We Record Outcomes In Reading
Our children offer a huge range of daily starting points and school readiness, therefore we have carefully considered ways of demonstrating progress and outcomes and how these must be adaptable to suit the needs of learners and the requirements of the subject. Therefore each subject has its own bespoke way of gathering evidence from learners that are not simply restricted to traditional pupil exercise books - otherwise recording work becomes a barrier to learning rather than a chance to celebrate children’s achievements and specialist skills and knowledge in areas where they may otherwise excel.
