Reading at Amberley Primary School

Curriculum Intent (Reading)

At Amberley our aim is to equip all of our children with the skills needed to become independent, fluent and passionate readers. As detailed in our overall curriculum intent, the teaching of reading at Amberley embraces all three of our core values: nurturing, innovation and aspiration. By focusing on these three key priorities at the heart of our curriculum, we believe our children will be ready to successfully meet the challenges of the next stage of their education. We strive to enable every child, regardless of their background, needs or abilities, to become a good reader and we aim to provide rich, engaging experiences of reading that inspire the child to become passionate lifelong readers.

The school has clear expectations of pupils’ phonics progress term-by-term, from Nursery to Year 2, and the school’s 'Read Write Inc.' phonics programme aligns consistently with these expectations. Regular and accurate assessment continually informs teaching of phonics, comprehension and fluency to ensure all children make rapid progress. The sequence of reading books is matched closely to the school's phonics programme and, until children reach the end of the phonics programme, they take home a phonetically decodable book. This will be based on sounds children have been previously taught, which allows them the opportunity to continually revise prior learning and continue to consolidate sounds.

At Amberley, we know how important parental involvement is to a child’s reading education and therefore we aim to regularly engage parents through a variety of reading based workshops, including phonics and guided reading. We also endeavour to promote reading to parents through annual reading challenges which involves parents reading regularly with their children and sharing their reading experiences via Twitter and through home-school tasks.

Curriculum Implementation

Whole class reading is delivered five times per week in KS2 and is worked towards in Year 2, following successful completion of the 'Read Write Inc.' phonics programme. These reading sessions centre on vocabulary rich and engaging texts from a variety of genres. Children pick apart texts using a range of ‘reading strategies’ to gain a true understanding of the author’s intent, structure of the text, themes within a text and vocabulary. The 'reading strategies' that children are taught underpin the strands of the National Curriculum for reading.

Reading Strategies

Children who are working within the school’s reading scheme also read 1:1 a minimum of once per week with a teacher or skilled teaching assistant. Home-school reading records allow conversations between parents and teachers to take place around reading and children’s reading achievements. For pupils who have completed the school reading scheme choose books initially from a carefully selected, age appropriate range of fiction and non-fiction texts which are checked regularly for pupil understanding of text, vocabulary and fluency of decoding words. Once teachers are confident that children are able to select their own texts, children in UKS2 ‘check in’ and ‘check out’ their book choices using either a QR based scanning and logging scheme or a via their class teacher. Teachers regularly monitor children's text choices to enable them to assess pupil's reading stamina, current interests in texts and comprehension. 

Children begin their phonics journey in Nursery by focusing on the ‘seven aspects’ of ‘Phase 1’ taken from the Letters and Sounds documentation; which ranges from hearing sounds in the environment to listening and remembering sounds as well as talking about sounds. Following the Read, Write, Inc. scheme, formal daily phonics lessons are carried out from Reception to Year 2. The teaching of sounds is progressive throughout EYFS and KS1 and children's sound knowledge is regularly checked through ongoing formative teacher assessments and well-matched summative assessments. The teaching of specific phonemes and grapheme representations begins in Reception, where children begin by recognising single sounds, how to say them and how to form them. As children progress throughout Reception and KS1, the teaching, application and consolidation of consonant and vowel digraphs and trigraphs takes place in the form of both reading and writing activities. In KS2, phonics intervention is provided in small groups where appropriate, in addition to BRP (Boosting Reading@Primary), to further support children with reading skills.  

At Amberley, we strive to encourage a love of reading in all of our learners, regardless of their background. We provide a range of opportunities to nourish and enrich enthusiasm for reading with the aim of all children becoming lifelong, passionate readers. Detailed below are some of the ways in which we aim to embed such passion.

We have constructed a reading shack within the outdoor learning environment at Amberley, which provides pupils with the opportunity and freedom to read in their own time within the school day, for example during break or lunchtime.

In addition to this, our wonderful 'Amberley Reading Ambassadors' from UKS2 read with some of our Year 2 children weekly. This encourages peer-to-peer book talk, as well as giving our younger children a fantastic reading role model. 

At Amberley, we also take part in annual author visits where children are the given the opportunity to engage in a workshop with a range of authors who specialise in current children’s literature. Many children take this opportunity to buy the books and have them signed by the author. We believe that such experiences connect learned in the classroom with the wider world and increase and improve pupils motivation to read and write.

We are fortunate enough at Amberley to have our local library within walking distance and therefore seize this opportunity for our children to visit once per half term, meaning we have continued access to new and diverse texts for children to enjoy!

Reading Scheme

At Amberley we follow the Read, Write, Inc phonics scheme. This scheme provides children with an engaging range of phonetically decodable books matched in line with or slightly behind the progression of sounds they are taught in class. Children take home the matching 'book bag' books which corresponds with the 'storybooks' which they read in lessons. 

After children complete the phonics scheme, a progressive selection of fiction and non-fiction books have been carefully selected to support the ongoing development of children's fluency and comprehension skills. 

Pupil Voice

We feel it is important that we listen to the feedback of our children at Amberley and they are very positive about their reading lessons.

A child from lower Key Stage 2 exclaimed...

“We all enjoy it...you never know what’s coming next, it’s so exciting!”

Another shared...

“I like doing the quizzes and predicting what’s going to happen next.”

A child from upper Key Stage 2 said...

“After reading books in whole class reading, I’ve started to read more at home. If you’re stressed, it calms you."

Curriculum Impact (Reading)

Teaching and support staff use a wide range of formative assessment tools during the lesson to judge the impact that the teaching is having on children’s learning. To further measure the impact of reading teaching of reading and learning we also deliver summative assessments at the end of each term. This is a helpful tool to measure how deep the children have embedded the strands of reading when it is assessed out of context and at a later date to the initial teacher input. Question level analysis (QLA) is then completed of these tests to measure this impact and help inform planning for the next term. From this QLA, children are identified where learning of the strands of reading has not been fully embedded. These children are then grouped based on their needs and attend interventions based on the strands they have found challenging.

It is vital that measuring the impact of our teaching of reading closely informs our planning going forward, individualising our curriculum to meet the needs of all children.