In Early Years, developing the skills of early reading is a priority. We encourage reading throughout the day and continue to enhance the child’s journey with reading at home. To inspire a love of reading amongst the children, we encourage parents/carers to read with their child regularly and provide them with books to share. At school, we have wide range of quality texts that are promoted throughout the learning environment both inside and outside. Children enjoy the opportunities to share, listen, act out, re-tell and read books daily. Book corners are stimulating and accessible, owned and loved by children.  Class teachers also carefully choose texts to read to their classes every day.

Pupils who are at the early stages of their phonics development are given a decodable text so that they can practice what they have learnt. The decodable text will focus on recently and previously learnt sounds (not the current focus of learning for that week) so that the children be successful and develop their knowledge of the code more securely.  Children also choose a book from our Infant Library to take home and share alongside their decodable text, to support their comprehension and foster their love of reading.

As pupils move through the Initial Code, they read books which are closely matched to their phonics knowledge.  In this way, pupils are encouraged to use their phonics skills and knowledge as their primary reading strategy.  Our expectation is that pupils should be reading with fluency before moving up to the next reading level.  As pupils become efficient in decoding words quickly and independently, their reading increases as does the number of words they can read automatically.  Increasing the pace of reading is an important objective in order to support developing reading comprehension.  Pupils are encouraged to read aloud as well as silently.  As pupils progress through the Extended Code, many begin reading longer texts with a greater number of complex words independently and with increasing fluency. This process culminates in a shift from learning to read to reading to learn where pupils progress to reading both for pleasure and for information.