Reading at St Gregory’s
At St. Gregory's, we promote a reading rich environment. We have a widely stocked library that children are able to access during the school day and after school. We hold regular parent information sessions regarding the teaching of reading, and we invite parents in to assist during guided reading sessions.
Foundation stage and Key Stage 1
In the Foundation Stage and Key Stage One, pupils are taught discrete phonics based on the phases and principles of Letters and Sounds, using supplementary resources from the Floppy’s Phonics Programme. We make use of a range of fully decodable reading schemes for home reading, including BBC Active, Phonics Bug and Floppy's Phonics. All pupils participate in a daily spelling or phonics session. The six phases of the Letters and Sounds document provides a structure for the teachers to follow and plan children’s progression. The teachers carefully adapt their planning to meet the needs of the children within their class. The Phases taught in each year group are outlined below:
- Nursery - Phase 1
- Reception - Phase 2, 3 and 4
- Year 1 - Phase 4 and 5
- Year 2 - Phase 6
At the end of Year One the children will take the statutory National Phonic Screening Check. If children are still working towards passing the Screening Check by the end of Year One then they will access interventions to enable them to retake the test in Year Two.
Key Stage Two
In Key Stage Two, the children who are not able to successfully blend and segment for reading and writing, will receive structured Phonics interventions in order to ensure they are able to access the Key Stage Two National Curriculum. All pupils in Key Stage Two take part in guided reading sessions, using the Bug Club scheme and resources.
At St Gregory’s, we understand the importance and impact of reading across the curriculum and we try to promote this ethos to the children we teach.
Children are given a range of opportunities to read in Key stage two, to include: One to one reading with adults, ERIC (children choosing a book to read in a comfortable place in the class in silence), paired reading with a peer, guided reading, shared reading, termly class novels linked to literacy topics and story time at the start/end of the day.
Through all of these opportunities, our aim is to foster and develop a love of reading in children. In addition to this, we participate in reading- related events such as world book days, book sales and book swaps. These help continue to raise the profile of reading and children have the opportunity to talk about their book preferences and complete book reviews, bring characters to life, hear from real-life authors as well as working collaboratively in cross- phase projects.
The skill of comprehension is something of great importance and we teach this across the curriculum areas. We work together with the children to understand and apply the skills of inference and deduction- ensuring we use texts that are appropriate to the age range and also engage the children. Comprehension is taught through guided reading as well as during literacy lessons when appropriate.