Teaching of Reading
At Dedham Church of England Primary School we understand that it is essential that the teaching of reading focuses on developing competence in both word reading and comprehension.
As stated in the National Curriculum 2014, “skilled word reading involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. Underpinning both is the understanding that the letters on the page represent the sounds in spoken word.” Consequently, phonics is emphasised throughout EYFS & KS1 at Dedham and pupils are taught to apply their phonic knowledge and skills as the route to decode words until automatic decoding has become embedded and reading is fluent.
As a school, we use the Read Write Inc approach to teaching reading and within their first couple of weeks of starting in EYFS, children begin to receive daily phonics and handwriting lessons using the Read Write Inc approaches and resources. Through regular, systematic teaching, our children quickly learn to link sounds and letters and they work towards learning to recognise at speed the 44 sounds in the English language as quickly as possible. They also learn to blend these sounds into words, and then learn to read the same sounds with alternative graphemes. Children also learn to read ‘red words’ (tricky/non-decodable words), for example ‘the’ and ‘they’.
In EYFS and KS1, we use Read Write Inc books for group reading in school and we send these home together with the corresponding Read Write Inc Book Bag Books for children to read with their parents and carers. We continue to use these books for children moving into KS2 if they need additional phonics teaching. We also use Bug Club books to provide additional reading material to build fluency for children once they have finished the Read Write Inc scheme, as well as other schemes such as Project X and books published by Barrington Stoke. As soon as teachers consider children to be sufficiently fluent and confident, children are then supported to choose their own chapter books to read.
We believe passionately that children need to be encouraged and supported to read widely so as to establish an appreciation and a love of reading. Our subscription to Essex School Library Service Premier package enables us to constantly review and change the stock of books that we have in school and children are able to choose from a wide selection of fiction, non-fiction and poetry books.