Woodheys Primary School
Phonics Intent, Implementation and Impact
Reading
What is our INTENT for Reading at Woodheys?
If children can read, they have the capacity to learn anything.
At Woodheys, we strive to develop a love of books that allows children’s world to open up, through our ethos, attitudes and practices. Enthusiasm and engagement, intertwined with a well-planned and structured approach to discrete teaching of the skills, leads to developing lifelong readers.
Reading is at the heart of our curriculum and we build time for children to share texts at an individual, group and whole class level, in all of our subjects.
High quality resources, exciting opportunities and a healthy daily diet all support children to reach their potential.
What does our IMPLEMENTATION for Reading look like at Woodheys?
We encourage our children to read and share texts as individuals, groups and as a whole class.
Individual reading
1. We continue to heavily invest in diverse, engaging and phonic/ ability matched individual reading books to ensure that all children develop and sustain a love of reading and positive attitudes towards their own abilities.
2. Children speak very highly of the reading books and show genuine interest and enthusiasm. E.g. Children have created ‘Pick me’ cards for books in the reading scheme, where they have given a synopsis of a book they have read and enjoyed, in order to inspire others to read it.
3. We develop engaging reading areas for children to select and explore fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
4. We use the Little Wandle early reading and phonics approach in EYFS and KS1 (and target children in KS2). Staff have received high quality training and have worked hard to embed the scheme into their daily schedule.
5. We regularly monitor children’s progress through teacher assessment, Little Wandle assessments, benchmarking, Rising Stars comprehensions and respond accordingly.
6. We celebrate success and effort.
e.g. We have ‘Super Readers’ who receive badges and access to ‘Super Books’ (books from that particular phase’s ‘recommended reads’)
Whole class reading
1. We have moved towards regular, whole class reading sessions to ensure that all pupils have the opportunity to develop their skills in every reading domain, regardless of their book banding. It allows the class to be exposed to high quality texts and builds enthusiasm. We use resources such as Reading Planet, Cracking Comprehensions and Classroom Secrets, alongside other well-chosen texts, images and extracts, to develop decoding, defining, predicting, summarising, inferring, etc…
2. We regularly share a ‘class text’, which is often voted for by the children to celebrate the reading culture at our school.
3. Talk4Writing is used in English lessons. It allows children to be exposed to high quality texts, which they explore thoroughly, considering the layout, language features and sentence structures of a range of genres.
Group reading
1. Children also have opportunities to have tailored group reading time to allow teachers to support target groups to further identify a particular skill.
2. Staff in KS1 follow ‘Little Wandle Keep up' sessions to support target groups.
Intervention times are well planned for and groups are often fluid, in order for teaching staff to respond to the specific needs of the children.
Reading in the wider curriculum
1. All year groups have invested in a range of texts to accompany their foundation subjects. These texts are shared in topic areas whilst a particular unit of work is being studied and children then have access to them for the year, to allow them to follow their interests.
Individual reading books, in a range of book bands, also have texts linked to topics.
2. Often, texts are used a hook for a given topic.
3. We map out English genres/ text types/ hook books for both English lessons and topic levels and always seek to make cross curricular links.
3. Lessons time is given to support children learning for themselves using websites, artefacts and reference books.
Other reading opportunities to develop that 'love for reading'
1. World Book Day
2. Waterstones project.
3. Peer reading
4. Scholastic Book fair.
Please find attached some information about developing reading
