To see our full rationale for Reading at Etherley Lane, please click here.
At Etherley Lane, we are passionate about reading. We do not just teach the reading curriculum; we also strive to develop the reading environment, celebrate reading and engage parents in order for all of our children to become lifelong readers. We want the children at Etherley Lane to develop a passion for reading and be able to apply their reading skills across the curriculum. When the children leave Etherley Lane, we want the children to be able to utilise these skills in their lives.
Read Write Inc.
From the beginning of September in Early Years, children are introduced to our ‘Read Write Inc.’ synthetic phonics programme. We have fidelity to a single programme to ensure consistency in strategies introduced. In the programme, children learn sounds and the letters that represent them, and how to form the letters. Then, they read books written using only the letters they have learnt (and a small number of separately taught ‘tricky words’). This gives the children plenty of early success and builds up their reading confidence.
Children are taught phonics every day for 20 minutes initially in Early Years, building up to 45 minutes by the end of the Autumn Term. In Year 1, children are taught phonics every day for one hour as part of their English lessons. In order to support the work on phonics that the children do in school, phonic books are sent home with the children. These books are designed to consolidate and reinforce the sounds being taught in Read Write Inc.
Please click here to find out more information about Read Write Inc. and what you can do to further support your child.
Accelerated Reader
We use Accelerated Reader in school with children in Year 2 to Year 6 to ensure our children make more rapid progress in their reading.
Children will take a Star Reading test 6 times over the course of the year; this is then used to give the children a book level from which to start from.
Children will then read AT LEAST 3 books at their given book level. At least one of these books should be a non-fiction text.
After a child has finished reading each book, they will take a quiz to demonstrate their understanding. They need to score 80% or above in order to ’pass’ the quiz.
Once the child has ‘passed’ AT LEAST 3 quizzes at their current level, they may move up to the next book level. Staff will use their professional judgement to decide when a child is ready to do this. This is to ensure that the children are reading and understanding a range of texts in order for them to continue to develop a range of reading skills such as vocabulary meaning, inference and deduction.
The nature of Accelerated Reader is that there can be movement between levels should a child score less than 80% on more than one occasion. It is important that children are able to read texts fluently in order to understand what they are reading and children may need more practice to do this.
Your child’s reading record will indicate the action that will be taken after each quiz has been completed.
To support your child with reading at home, we ask that you spend at least 10 minutes per day listening to them read. We value your input and the comments that you provide about your child’s reading. We know that the best way to support your child’s reading is by working together!
Please click here to find out more information about Accelerated Reader.
We implement this further by exploring a wide range of different genres and complexities of texts so that by the time they reach Year 6 and beyond, they have a good understanding of all of them and are able to access the more complex books expected of them in secondary schools.
We carefully choose and select texts to study, to take extracts from and to read as a whole. The texts selected should be pitched at just above the level of the most able reader in the class in order to provide challenge for all readers.
In each year group from Year 1-Year 6, we select narratives and poems across the following five themes:
- archaic/classic language (include vocabulary, syntax and cultural reference of texts over 50 to 100 years old)
- non-linear time sequences (where the story is not told in chronological order, e.g. flashbacks, flashforwards)
- narratively complex (stories that have an unreliable narrator, multiple narrators or a non-human narrator)
- figurative/symbolic text (texts which happen on a metaphorical or symbolic level)
- resistant texts (texts written to deliberately resist easy meaning-making by readers)
Alongside these narratives and poems, we read a good balance of topic-appropriate non-fiction to help further develop children’s background knowledge of the subject they are studying and to develop comprehension skills in the context of non-fiction.
Please view the Our Classes section of our website to find out more about what your child is reading this term in their class.
