Reading
At West Hove Infant School we aim to foster a love of literature and language and the confidence for children to be avid readers throughout their lives. We are a reading-rich school and quality texts are the bedrock of our practice. We want all children to develop a life-long love of reading and to be competent, confident readers who access and enjoy a diverse range of genres. Children are supported to read regularly throughout the day through all subjects and are taught not only to decode text but also to interpret and understand it.
All topics are based around quality core texts which feed into the children’s writing. In English lessons, ambitious core texts are read and analysed as a class and used as a stimulus to structure and inspire writing.
Timetabled group reading sessions give children opportunities to read and learn about a wide variety of high-quality text types. Sessions focus on the teaching and learning of different reading skills and strategies, which underpin reading development. Group and independent activities focus on embedding these skills, promoting a love of ambitious vocabulary and building a bank of comprehension and inference strategies.
In our reading-rich environment, children listen to and read books every day. In year 2, whole-class Drop Everything and Read sessions are used to introduce challenging and exciting books and further enhance children’s critical thinking skills. Children in YR and Y1 similarly enjoy regular story times. Children also enjoy two story-based assemblies each week, using high quality and often thought-provoking texts which develop their empathy, thinking and inference skills further.
When children in year 2 have progressed beyond fully decodable books, real books are colour-banded to enable the children to select appropriately leveled books to read at home and in school.
Every classroom has a well-stocked, inviting and cosy reading area. These contain both fiction and non-fiction texts and reflect the current topic.
Each site has a well-stocked library of categorised books, to be selected based on topic with the help of the class teacher. Books are also available for children to enjoy in other areas of the school such as our nurture and intervention rooms.
Every classroom has reading displays, which include phonics, spelling, vocabulary and reading prompts. These follow our phonics scheme (Little Wandle) and support, promote and enhance reading further. Such displays and those in our communal areas also celebrate our love of reading and reflect our passionate belief that reading is at the heart of our curriculum.
All children have a Reading Diary which parents/carers can complete to show that their child has read or shared a book at home. Reading benchmarks are shared and celebrated with the Heads of School.
In addition, in Year 2, we run an intervention programme for those children who need extra ‘catch-up’ support after progressing beyond our phonics scheme. This invention, Read 2 Write, closely links reading and writing and mirrors the explicit teaching of reading skills and strategies in class to support children to develop further confidence in their reading. All new Read 2 Write groups have started visiting Hove Library.
In addition to our daily reading, we take part wholeheartedly in World Book Day events, reading competitions, author visits, book sales and as many events as we can to promote a sense of wonder and delight in reading.
Phonics
Phonics is a way of teaching children to read and write. It is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds and understand the link between the sound (phoneme) and the way it is written (grapheme). We teach children to apply phonic knowledge as a first approach to reading.
We use Little Wandle as our phonics scheme. Further information about this can be found by following the links below.
Phonics at West Hove Infant School
At West Hove Infants, we believe all our children can become fluent readers which is why we teach phonics and reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds revised programme. This is a systematic synthetic programme of phonics (SSP) that adheres to the essential core criteria outlined in the DFE’s Phonics Programme validation documentation.
Phonics teaches children the sound each letter, or group of letters, represents and is the first step in children learning how to read. Children will begin to recognise letters, or groups of letters, and the sounds they make, which they then use to blend sounds together for reading, and segment them when writing. The children are taught to hear, identify and spell 44 sounds in the British language. At its earliest stage, children are taught one way to read and spell each sound and in KS1 this broadens out to include more complex spelling patterns. Please see detailed guidance on Phonics lessons and progress here.
Please find the link below to the Little Wandle website for information for parents/carers to show how we are teaching Little Wandle in our school. The resources on this page will help you support your child with saying their sounds and writing their letters. There are also some useful videos so you can see how they are taught at school and feel confident about supporting their reading at home. The page also includes the full Reception and Year 1 teaching programme overview to see what your child will learn and when.
https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/
Further information about Reading Letter – School Road
Further information about Reading Letter – Holland Road
Programme-Overview_Reception-and-Year-1
Supporting your child’s reading journey over the summer break