Reading
Our vision for reading is to teach all children how to read with accuracy, fluency and expression, so that they are able to comprehend and discuss what they have read, as well as to provide a broad, balanced and ambitious diet of high-quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry that will expand their vocabulary and background knowledge.
“Raising Aspirations” is embedded into all elements of school life and learning at Minet Infant and Nursery School, including in the reading curriculum. Reading is an integral part of the school’s core curriculum and through creating a coherently sequenced reading curriculum that is relevant to the children’s needs and interests, we aim to provide the best possible life chances for each child, opening up the advantages and opportunities the world has to offer. To enable this, we aim for every child to leave our school being fluent and expressive readers, who have cultivated a lifelong love of reading.
Reading plays an important role in working towards the aims of the school’s curriculum. We aim for all children to learn to decode the sounds in the English language to read words accurately, before developing their ability to read fluently and expressively. We do this primarily through daily Phonics sessions for all children (‘Read, Write, Inc.’ for Reception-Year2 and Phase 1 ‘Letters and Sounds’ for Nursery), where every adult is an expert teacher of reading. We also listen to every child read at least once a fortnight and support those that require it through daily interventions.
All of these will then enable them to understand and discuss the fiction, non-fiction and poetry that they read or listen to. One way we nurture these skills is through daily story-times throughout the school and via whole-class reading for our KS1 children, where they are exposed to rich texts above their reading ability.
We believe it is important all children have access to and experience reading a range of texts that will broaden their vocabulary and expand their cultural capital. We do this through exposing them to texts that cover a range of genres and texts that contain real and imaginative worlds, characters, authors and settings that are diverse, and themes that are pertinent to the world they live in. The texts we choose act as ‘windows’ that children can look out into worlds they have never experienced and ‘mirrors’ that they can look into to see themselves and those around them being represented.
Furthermore, we aim for our school values of respect, resilience and responsibility to be ingrained into our reading curriculum. These values are explored through our book choices, many of which contain plots that relate to our values, as well as discussions about characters and their motives and actions.
We have achieved this through designing a curriculum that is centred around high-quality texts. These are the texts we focus on during our English lessons, but they also link to other areas of our foundation curriculum. This, combined with our initiative of ‘100 books to read before leaving Minet’, ensures that children experience a diverse range of key texts, develop strong reading skills and a love for reading during their time with us.
Phonics
As a school, we use the well-established Read, Write, Inc. scheme to teach Phonics to all the children in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2. More information can be found on our RWI page.
Children who have completed RWI move onto a Comprehension group, where they read and answer questions about more difficult texts, before moving onto a whole-class reading group. Their reading books are also not RWI Storybooks, but White, Lime or Brown books from the Oxford Reading Tree range as these are more appropriate for their ability.
Nursery children are taught Phase 1 Phonics using the ‘Letters & Sounds’ scheme. This involves them learning about and exploring the following seven aspects:
Environmental Sounds
Instrumental Sounds
Body Percussion
Rhythm and rhyme
Alliteration
Voice sounds
Oral blending and segmenting
Whole-Class Reading
We teach Whole-Class Reading to our KS1 children and have selected high-quality, vocabulary-rich texts that will develop their background knowledge of texts and increase their cultural capital. Year 1 start this in the final half-term of the year.
During each unit, we explicitly teach children the background knowledge and unfamiliar vocabulary, so that they can access the texts. We also practise reading the text daily to increase fluency. All of this helps the children to successfully answer comprehension questions about the text by the end of the week.
We ensure that they are exposed to questions that cover all six strands of comprehension, using the acronym VIPERS:
Vocabulary
Inference
Prediction
Explanation
Retrieval
Sequencing/Summarising
Book Corners
Every classroom has a book corner, which contains a variety of books, including fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
Through the year, each year group has two focus authors, whose books are displayed in the classroom too.
The 25 books that we want all the children in that year group to read are also available, so that the pupils are exposed to high-quality children’s literature every single day in their story-time session.
In a separate area of the classroom, books related to the half-termly topic can also be found.
Library (school and local)
Children from Reception to Year 2 also visit our school library once a week, where they can borrow fiction, non-fiction or poetry books.
The library has been organised into sections, so that children can find books on topics they are interested in or books written by their favourite authors.
The children also have opportunities throughout the year to visit the local library and we encourage all our families to make use of the library on a regular basis, since it is completely free to borrow books.
100 Books Before You Leave Minet
Every year group has 25 books that we aim for all children to read before they move onto the next year group. This means that a child who journeys through Minet, from Nursery to Year 2, will read and listen to 100 texts. These are all high-quality books (80 fiction and 20 non-fiction) selected from Pie Corbett’s reading spine, CLPE’s book suggestions and our own personal favourites.
Book Fairs
Twice a year, the Travelling Book Fair visits us at Minet Infant & Nursery, providing families with a chance to buy books for their home. Not only does it foster a love of reading and encourage reading for pleasure, it also raises money for our school, so that we can buy more high-quality literature for our book corners and library.
Click the link below to find out about our phonics scheme: