Reading at Temple Guiting

At Temple Guiting School we aim for all our children to become fluent, confident readers who are passionate about reading.

Children who read regularly or are read to regularly have the opportunity to open the doors to so many different worlds! More importantly, reading will give your child the tools to become independent life-long learners.

We can achieve this together through:

• Little Wandle, a program to help to your child read at school

• Encouraging children to develop a love of books by reading to them daily, at home and at school

• Giving children access to a wide range of books at school and at home
   

Intent

Our aim is for all children to have a secure and solid knowledge and understanding of letters and sounds, ensuring that it is embedded and built upon as they progress through the Early Years and KS1. From Reception, Phonics is taught following the Little Wandle Revised Letters and Sounds Programme, which ensures a consistent and systematic approach to the teaching and learning of phonics. Children have discrete, daily phonics teaching following the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression. During these sessions children revise previous knowledge, are introduced to new phonemes, graphemes and tricky words, practice blending and segmenting for reading and writing and have plenty of opportunities to apply their newly learnt knowledge and skills. Teachers draw upon observations and continuous assessment to ensure children are stretched and challenged and to identify children who may need additional support.

At Temple Guiting School, we encourage and support the application of phonics within shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum.

Staff are dedicated to advocating the love and pleasure of reading by immersing children in stories through shared reading and encouraging discussion around books. Whilst early reading is explicitly taught through phonics, it is also interwoven into all aspects of learning across the school curriculum. 

Implementation

Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1

• We teach phonics each morning for 25 minutes a day. In Reception, we build from 10-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to the full-length lesson as quickly as possible. Children make a strong start in Reception: teaching begins in Week 2 of the Autumn term.
• Each Friday, we review the week’s teaching to help children become fluent readers.
• The teaching of whole-class phonics is delivered using grapheme/phoneme correspondence (GPC) flashcards.
• Little Wandle phonics lessons are tailored to ensure that every child’s phonics needs are met within whole-class teaching.
  • Sentence level work will be adapted to both support and challenge individual learners.
  • Additional adults will be used to support individuals and/or groups of learners.
• We follow the Little Wandle expectations of progress:
  • Children in Reception are taught to read and spell words using Phase 2 and 3 GPCs, and words with adjacent consonants (Phase 4) with fluency and accuracy.
  • Children in Reception are taught Phase 2, 3 and 4 tricky words.
  • Children in Year 1 review Phase 2, 3 and 4 phonemes and tricky words.
  • Children in Year 1 are taught to read and spell words using Phase 5 GPCs with fluency and accuracy and Phase 5 tricky words.

Year 2 and beyond

• Children are taught the Little Wandle Spelling daily which consitis of phase 5 review, bridge to spelling and spelling units across the year.
• Those children in Year 2 and beyond who require additional phonics interventions will recieve daily Rapid Catch-Up interventions. 
   

Reading Practice Sessions

We teach children to read through reading practice sessions three times a week.

• These:
  • are taught by a fully trained adult to small groups of approximately six children
  • use books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge.
  • use books that children are able to read with 90% fluency.
  • are monitored by the class teacher, who rotates and works with each group on a regular basis.
• Each reading practice session has a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory.
• The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills:
  • decoding: segmenting and blending strategies and discussions surrounding phonemes and graphemes are a focus. 
  • prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression
  • comprehension: teaching children to understand the text.

• In Reception these sessions start in Week 4. Children who are not yet decoding have daily additional blending practice in small groups as part of their 'keep up' sessions, so that they quickly learn to blend and can begin to read books.
• In Year 2 and beyond, we continue to teach reading in this way for those children who still need to practise reading with decodable books.
   

Impact

Assessment

Assessment is used to monitor progress and to identify any child needing additional support as soon as they need it.

•  Ongoing assssments are carried out:
  • daily within class to identify children needing 'keep-up' support
  • weekly in the Review lesson to assess gaps, address these immediately and secure fluency of GPCs, words and spellings.
•  Summative assessment is used:
  • every six weeks to assess progress, to identify gaps in learning that need to be addressed, to identify any children needing additional support and to plan the 'keep-up' support that they need.
  • Early Years and Key Stage One use the half termly coding system to track individual progress.
  • Those in KS2 still using our phonics decodable books will continue to be assessed and tracked regularly using previous assessments, Rapid Catch-Up assessments and Fluency assessments.

•  Statutory assessments
  • Children in Year 1 sit the Phonics screening check. Any child not passing the check re-sits it in Year 2.
• Ongoing assessment for catch-up: Children in Year 2 to 6 are assessed through: their teacher’s ongoing formative assessment, the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds placement assessment, the appropriate half-termly assessments

​

Supporting your child at home