Approach to Reading and Phonics

At Boothferry reading is at the heart of our curriculum. Our reading lessons are intended to offer a broad diet of rich texts ensuring children are exposed to all text types several times through each academic year. The lessons have an intention of providing high quality texts and coherent, progressive questions building on all of the skills needed to ensure children are fluent, comprehensive readers via quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts.

As a school we aim to build on children’s vocabulary whilst also promoting and developing cultural capital throughout the school.

Our reading curriculum is designed to align with the national curriculum, however, goes above and beyond expectations ensuring texts are selected from our tailored Boothferry reading spine that will inspire and motivate young readers to foster a lifelong love for reading. The curriculum is coherently planned and sequenced allowing pupils to further deepen their knowledge, skills and understanding in all aspects of reading. We aim to support the needs of the children in our school community with low levels of language and many children with English as an additional language, the explicit teaching of language and vocabulary is paramount to our children’s attainment. We understand that Pupils’ acquisition and command of vocabulary are key to their learning and progress across the whole curriculum.
We passionately believe Parents and carers are fundamental in their child’s development and as a school, we encourage through home reading support ensuring parents are well informed about school expectations, rewards and competitions.

Our reading curriculum at Boothferry Primary School enables all pupils to fulfil our school vision embracing diversity, building a better future together.

Early Years/Key Stage 1

We use the synthetic phonics scheme Read Write Inc to teach children the skills to become enthusiastic, fluent and confident readers and writers. Across Early Years and Key Stage 1 the children are taught at a dedicated time and in small similar ability groups with the children being regularly assessed, to ensure that we are best meeting their needs.

The Read Write Inc scheme promotes the teaching of phonics through a structured and uniform approach with the children participating 100% in the learning process.

The scheme ensures that the children are taught the sounds and corresponding graphemes needed to be successful for reading and writing. The children apply their learning of new sounds to read and write both real and nonsense words, in preparation for the Phonics Screening Test in Year 1.

Each session includes these key elements:

Step 1 – Hear it and Say it. The children are introduced to the new sound
Step 2 – Speed sounds. The children read the new sound and revisit previously taught sounds
Step 3 – Read it. The children read the new sound within a word. Developing their decoding and blending skills.
Step 4 – Write it. The children are first taught how to correctly form each letter and as they progress through the scheme they are taught how to write a word containing the sound.

It is important that children’s reading books are matched to the grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) that they already know. We ensure that children in KS1 take home books that are fully decodable and carefully matched to reinforce their classroom phonics learning.

“In key stage 1, a more consistent approach to the teaching of phonics has ensured that pupils are confident readers who remain enthusiastic when tackling unfamiliar words.”
Ofsted 2019

Key Stage 2

In Key Stage 2 children will develop and extend the skills acquired in Key Stage 1. Through independent reading, shared reading, cross-curricular sessions, guided reading groups and reading for pleasure. When children have completed the Read Write Inc. scheme they move onto Accelerated Reader. Children start this process from Year 2 onwards. Accelerated Reader is designed to motivate and support our children in their learning journey. It allows teachers to ensure texts are at the correct level for each individual child. After each book read, children complete a comprehension quiz. Accelerated Reader also allows teachers to track how many books and for how long children are reading each day to ensure support is provided where needed.

Children explore a wide variety of genres, both fiction and non-fiction which allows them to access, input ideas and understand what they are reading. They are given opportunities to speculate on the tone and purpose of texts they explore as well as to consider both the themes and audience.

In 2022/2023 our Accelerated reader target was 50 million words. We managed over 52 million. This included the some children who were double word millionaires. Our 2023/2024 target it 54 million words.

Reading Awards

At Boothferry we offer a huge variety of reading awards and motivational strategies. Some of these include:

• Reading role model certificate which is awarded to one child in each class who is making excellent progress and trying hard with reading
• Top reader certificate which is awarded to the child with the highest engaged reading time in each class or for the child with the most home reads in EYFS and KS1
• Highest quiz percentage certificate is awarded to the class with the highest percentage achieved on their Accelerated Reading quizzes
• Highest engaged reading time certificate which is awarded to the class who read for the most minutes on average per day
• Golden tickets- children with 25 or more home reads are given a golden ticket. All golden tickets go into a hat at the end of each half term and the lucky winner receives a kindle tablet
• Children that reach 1,000,000 words read receive a gold word millionaire badge and have their photo on our role of honour in the library
• The first class to reach 1,000,000 words read collectively receive a tasty treat from the kitchen. The competition then starts again!