Reading in the Early Years
Reading is an essential skill for lifelong learning. We want all our children to develop a love for reading alongside the necessary skills to be a confident, fluent reader.
Language and vocabulary development
James Britton highlights that “Reading and writing float on a sea of talk”.
We promote talk and language development through high quality interactions in play, focused activities to introduce new vocabulary and through targeted language intervention. This helps all children develop their vocabulary and understanding of grammatical structures.
Listening skills
To support all children to develop effective listening skills we plan adult led activities focused on concentration, sound discrimination and oral blending and segmenting. Children in the Early Years Foundation Stage learn a nursery rhyme of the week which we also send home so families can get involved too.
A love of stories and how to use a book
An essential component of early reading is ensuring all children are eager to explore books and enjoy stories. We nurture this through daily story sessions, our inviting reading areas, making sure there are books and reading opportunities in all areas of play provision and through visits to school from published authors. Children quickly learn pre-reading skills such as how to hold a book, how to turn the pages and the difference between pictures and print. We encourage all children to develop early prediction and inference skills through role play, small group discussion and answering questions like ‘What do you think might happen next?’.
Phonological awareness
Children are taught phoneme and grapheme correspondence and how to blend to read and segment to spell through the ‘Bookwings Phonics Scheme’. Children apply their developing skills in ‘Rhino Readers’ reading books matched to their phonic stage of development.
BookWings
We teach phonics using the Book Wings Scheme and we aim to teach a range of sounds every week. Here is the list of sounds we teach within the scheme. Each sound is linked to a book that your child will read in class. Please ask your class teacher for a list of sounds that your child has learnt this week.
Phases 2 and 3 are learnt in Reception. They continue in Year 1 with phase 5.
Bookwings - How to say each sound, Phase 2
Bookwings- How to say each sound, Phase 3
Bookwings - How to say each sound, Phase 5
This document explains how Bookwings Phonics has been validated by OCL.Validation of systematic synthetic phonics
Rhino Readers
Click here to read more on our Reading and Phonics page.