Reading

Reading

Reading opens to the door to learning. The importance of reading for children cannot be underestimated. Reading for pleasure can benefit a child’s education, social and cognitive development, their well being, and their mental health. Reading has a high profile at Hasland Infant School, we recognize the value of being able to read and throughout nursery and school.

We strive to develop a love of reading through exposure to high quality, rich texts. By the time the children leave our school we aim for them to have a love of reading, we want them to be confident readers who choose to read for pleasure and show understanding about what they have read.

At Hasland Infant School, we have recently adopted a new approach to teaching early reading to children working from the earliest developmental levels to text-literate decoders. Our new clear structured and sequenced approach allows us to target well-matched teaching to individuals and groups to support their progress.

Every child in Reception and Year 1 take part in three timetabled reading practice sessions a week. (Children in Year 2 take part in two sessions.) This is a dedicated 20 minutes of reading. Teachers ‘tap in’ to hear every child read without any distraction three times a week. Every child gets individual attention, and each session has a very clear focus.

Children also benefit from repeated practice in the pre-read part of each session. It helps them become quicker at reading the GPCs, words and tricky words they will find in the book. Their language learning is supported by the introduction of key vocabulary. Teachers use the same strategies as used in the daily phonics lesson sessions which helps reduce cognitive load.

Read 1: decoding – this has a clear focus on applying phonic knowledge to word reading.
Read 2: prosody – teaches children to read with prosody, so that they learn to read aloud with appropriate meaning, stress and intonation.
Read 3: comprehension – the final reading session explores comprehension.

We have had many unanticipated gains from adopting this new structure to our reading programme. These include:

Children becoming more confident to vocalise and explore voice sounds.
Children developing their vocabulary, background knowledge, attention, through the application of phonics and reading practice sessions.
A structured focus on comprehension skills for children who are proficient decoders, but need to develop their reading-for-meaning skills, which in turn develops other aspects of reading fluency, such as prosody, vocabulary knowledge and verbal reasoning.
Staff passion and aspirations for the use of high-quality texts to support early reading for all children and enthusiasm to teach children to decode as they see the possibilities and successes it supports
As well as, of course, many children learning to apply their phonic knowledge to start to read words and books for the first time.

Reading Information for Parents and Guardians

Reading Vipers Parents Letter

Our wonderful school library.

We love our school library! We are extremely lucky to have such a fantastic library filled with a huge range of fiction and non-fiction books. It is a lovely space to go and share books with our teachers and our friends. Each class visits the library once a week and every child has the opportunity to borrow a book to take home in their special library bag.

Reading Events

We often hold whole school events to celebrate reading. We sometimes spend full days enjoying books, telling stories, becoming authors and engaging in different reading activities.

Our school hall is regularly turned into a Reading Woodland (or a differing reading theme) and each class had the opportunity to go and share some stories there.

It's always a wonderful day and highlights the unlimited adventures reading can bring!