A love of Reading at Culcheth Community Primary School
Throughout our school from Reception to Year 6, our children are taught to develop a passion for reading.
Through modelled, shared and guided reading our children are encouraged to become the most confident and enthusiastic readers that they can be.
Reading in Reception and Key Stage 1
All of our children take part in a daily differentiated phonics session following the ‘Little Wandle Revised Letters and Sounds’ systematic synthetic phonics programme. From the very beginning of Reception the children are taught a variety of key skills to help them to become independent readers and to develop their comprehension skills. Alongside developing their ability to hear the phonemes (sounds) within words and to recognise the written graphemes (letter shapes) ,these Key Skills also include the ability to predict text using picture cues, building up a substantial sight vocabulary of common exception words. Please see our phonics page for further details on how we teach phonics in school.
Reading at School and at Home
All children are given a ‘Home/School’ Reading Diary along with their reading books. These enable parents and teachers to communicate and comment upon their child’s progress and efforts with their independent reading. The diaries are signed regularly by both teachers and parents. We make every effort to tailor our home reading books to the needs and interests of the children and their books are changed regularly throughout the week.
Reading within each Classroom
Following the successful completion of the Little Wandle phonics programme, the children’s reading levels are regularly assessed by the teaching staff using the ‘Benchmarking scheme’ and half termly NfER reading assessment tests (from Year 2 upwards). All of our reading materials are book banded enabling us to find the appropriate level of challenge for the children. All children have small group Guided Reading sessions throughout the week with a member of staff leading and questioning the children throughout the session.
All teaching staff across the school are careful to demonstrate good practises in reading through regular Modelled and Shared Reading times during whole class or small group teaching.
Additional Support in Reading Across the school
We have specific reading materials to encourage reluctant readers and an interactive reading resource called ‘Lexia’ which target children work independently on both at school and at home. Some children receive additional 1-1 reading support on a weekly or daily basis depending upon their individual needs. Target children also receive additional support with developing their reading through ‘Reading Buddies’ (key stage 2 children) and ‘Reading Rangers’ (family volunteers).
Reading at home in Key Stage 2
As within Key Stage 1, all children have Home School reading diaries to record parents, teachers and children’s comments. Reading at home is encouraged every night with those children who read at least three times a week receiving 'Golden Time' at the end of the week. All of our reading books are banded according to the level that the children are working at. All children have access a wide variety of high-quality texts all the way up to Black book band at the end of Year 6.
All classrooms across both key stages have colourful, attractive and well stocked room libraries for the children to access throughout the day.
The whole school has access to a programme called 'Collins ebooks' which is an online programme that provides the children with access to hundreds of books.
We also use the Lexia online programme following the successful completion of the Little Wandle programme and Reading Plus follows on from this. Reading Plus is an online adaptive reading programme that improves reading fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, stamina, and motivation.
