Reading

At Hall Green Infant School we value reading as a key life skill that underpins everything we do, and are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers with a love of reading. We believe reading is fundamental for academic success and so encompass this into all areas of our curriculum.

We know that our children come from diverse backgrounds and many are learning English as a second language therefore teaching reading and the knowledge and basic skills of how to read are the foundation for their future. By the time children leave Hall Green Infant School they should be articulate and literate individuals with a strong love of reading and the will to read.

Our approach for reading can be broken down into two fundamental strands:

Early reading including phonics
Reading for pleasure to develop a life-long love of reading

Early reading and phonics

Evidence shows that teaching phonics is the best way to teach children to read. Therefore, at Hall Green Infant School we deliver daily, high quality phonics lessons. These lessons provide explicit, systematic phonics instruction to teach early reading skills, such as decoding, word recognition and phonological awareness.

Please visit our phonics page on the Hall Green Infants website (https://www.hallgreeninfant.co.uk/phonics-183/) to learn more about our systematic, synthetic phonics programme Monster Phonics.

Decodable Book Scheme

The national curriculum says that pupils should be taught to:

… read aloud accurately books that are consistent with their developing phonic knowledge and that do not require them to use other strategies to work out words.

When children are learning to read, it is imperative that they practise independent reading with fully decodable books that are matched to their secure phonic knowledge. Therefore, at Hall Green Infants we have heavily invested in purchasing a high-quality and fully-decodable book scheme called 'Monster Phonics' to support children with their decoding as their knowledge of the alphabetic code increases. We supplement these decodable book titles with Dandelion Readers, Rising Stars Rocket Phonics and Big Cat Collins. These books are carefully aligned as a 'best fit' and provide additional reading practice for children.

Teachers carefully match books from the scheme to match each child’s current reading level to help them practice their decoding skills to ultimately develop their fluency and confidence in reading.

Home reading

Parents who engage their children in books prepare them to become fluent and enthusiastic readers: they can transform their attitudes to reading. We therefore ask all parents to read with their child every night and record this in their home reading records. Pupils are given a decodable reading book so that they can put their phonic knowledge into practise. We also encourage parents to read other stories and poems with or to their child. These 'sharing books' are for parents to share and read to their children, not to be read independently by the child. Children, who are developing fluency, should only be reading fully decodable books matched to their phonics knowledge.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” ― Dr. Seuss.

We recognise the importance of reading and therefore reading takes place every day through quality reading lessons such as:

Guided Reading

Reading is taught through dedicated, accurately planned sessions during which children are taught the skills to become confident, independent and motivated readers. In these sessions, we teach fundamental skills such as decoding, language comprehension, fluency, prosody so that children are able to retrieve and infer text.

Independent reading

Our well-designed book corners are used as a sanctuary for independent reading and a place for children to practice their reading and develop their love of books. Independent reading opportunities allow for our teachers to listen to their pupils read so that they can assess their reading ability and provide feedback to make improvements.

Reading Comprehension

Our Reception pupils have ‘Big Talk’ sessions, which support their acquisition of new vocabulary and language comprehension. In these sessions, children are encouraged to retrieve basic information and make simple inferences from pictures and/or props.

As children become fluent readers they begin 'Book Talk' lessons. These lessons use carefully selected, high-quality texts and children discuss the themes and structures of their texts. The lessons also focus on retrieval questions and vocabulary exploration and build-up to inference and prediction skills. At Hall Green Infants we use a range of texts and genres to support children’s background knowledge to support reading comprehension.

Developing a love of reading

At Hall Green Infants, we strive to build a culture of reading for enjoyment that will develop a lifelong love of reading and future academic success. See below some of the reading pleasure opportunities we provide our children:

Author of the Month
Celebrating World Book Day
Book corners, which act as ‘mini libraries’
Visiting authors and poets
A designated reading time is set each day where staff use props, story bags and storytelling techniques to bring books to life for children. All of our staff have been trained in the 'Art of Storytelling'.
Daily rhymes and poetry sessions (Reception and Year 1)