Reading
Staff are knowledgeable about teaching early reading. They teach phonics lessons in a consistent way. Pupils read with increasing accuracy and fluency as they progress through the school. Pupils who struggle are well supported by adults. This helps them to catch up with their peers. Pupils’ secure knowledge of how to read prepares them well for learning across the wider curriculum.
Ofsted July 2023
Reading is at the heart of the Waverley Junior Academy curriculum and is also one of our key drivers. We aim for every child to become a fluent reader. From the start of their journey with us, pupils are supported to develop a love of reading. They are exposed to high-quality texts and through a systematic, synthetic approach to the teaching of phonics, they are provided with the skills they need to decode confidently.
Early Reading
In the Early Years Foundation Stage, the ‘Communication and Language’ and ‘Literacy’ areas of learning support pupils in developing their reading skills. The FS2 curriculum and print rich learning environment ensure pupils have access to focussed, teacher led reading tasks as well as opportunities for child-initiated activities within continuous provision.
Thorough phonics assessments completed by the Early Years teachers enables a smooth transition into Key Stage One and ensures pupils continue to make good progress. Lessons are planned to cover all objectives set out in the statutory English curriculum and develop pupils’ love of reading.
Guided reading
Guided reading takes place for 30 minutes every day in Y1 and Y2 and begins in the Summer Term in FS2. High-quality texts, linked to the pupils’ book band / phonics level are used. The class teacher and TA each guide a group of readers. Reading fluency, expression and understanding is key. These 3 elements are integral to our guided reading session.
Reading Books
Our reading books are banded to match the phonic phases and ensure that children are only reading books that contain the graphemes they have been taught. This will enable the children to read a book fluently with 100% accuracy. Children will have been taught all the grapheme/ phoneme correspondence of a sub-phase before they can read a book from within that phase. For example, a child will need to know all the phase 3b graphemes before they have a phase 3b book. Once the child is a phase 5f reader they will move on to the Oxford Reading Tree colour banded books. Please see the table below.
Home School Reading
Home school links are very important in reading. When teachers and support staff listen to pupils read, this is recorded in their planners. We encourage parents/carers to listen to their child read regularly at home.
The children complete a ‘Read and Repeat’ cycle to support with fluency development. This means each week each child will take home –
- One phonic reading book and their current sub-phase for them to read to their parents/ carers.
- One ‘reading for pleasure’ book for their parents/ carers to read to/with them to develop a love of reading
KS2 Reading
As our pupils move into Key Stage 2, reading for meaning is embedded across the curriculum and is supplemented by daily focused reading sessions which take place every morning.
Our reading progression documents recognise the importance of fluency to ensure working memory is freed up. This enables the children to comprehend progressively more complex texts. Careful consideration is given to teaching the morphology of words, including the meaning of roots, prefixes and suffixes.
Age appropriate texts are carefully chosen from recommended reading lists for each year group. The level of challenge is progressive and covers a wide range genre to promote an appreciation of text structure, equality and diversity.
Reading sessions are planned to maintain a love for reading and develop skills as outlined in the National Curriculum:
- Vocabulary
- Fluency
- Summarising
- Inference
- Predication
- Explain
- Retrieval
Books to promote Diversity
Our Library
Our academy has a vibrant, text rich library full of recommended reading books for all ages and stages. Pupils access this weekly to change books or share a story. We subscribe to the Schools Library Service, who loan topic boxes (linked to our topics) and age-appropriate texts for the classrooms; full class sets of books; and non-fiction library books.
Book band Expectation
List of recommended reads