Reading

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Reading at our school

Reading unpins all that we do here at Blacklow Brow so much so we received the Gold Liverpool Quality mark. From the first week in Nursery children are encouraged to become early readers at home with parents and carers by giving them a reading book. Teachers, teaching assistants, student reading ambassadors and volunteers listen to children read individually on a one-to-one basis regularly.  This provides children with valuable one-to-one time, support and guidance. In addition to this, each day we have timetabled dedicated time for our staff to read a novel to the children.

We are committed to teaching children how to read, and enjoy reading, from an early age (Nursery or as soon as possible) through systematic synthetic phonics using Ruth Miskin’s Read, Write, Inc scheme. Children are taught phonics daily and access phonetically matched texts for reading in home and at school.

Once children have reached the appropriate standard for both fluency and accuracy a Shared Reading model is adopted in order to further develop reading skills and a deeper understanding of the text the children are reading. We teach reading through whole class discussion.  This helps to develop a range of reading skills including predictions, retrieval, visualisation, clarifying, inference, summarising, understanding of vocabulary and questioning.

During the school year, children will be exposed to at least 6 Shared Reading texts, 6 high quality English Novels within their core English lesson and a range of books that will be read to them during the daily ‘Love of Reading’ session.

Each child receives an appropriate reading-age text to take home and is encouraged to read at least 10 minutes every night.

Children are also able to choose their own books from a wide range in our class libraries and from our Reading for Pleasure area in school. As soon as children are assessed as competent readers and that they have a secure understanding of what they have read, they have more freedom to choose their own titles from the books we have in school.

We hold many Reading events to promote the importance of authors and their influences on not just a local level, but national and worldwide cultures. Authors visit our school to allow pupils to ask questions and aspire to become writers of novels such as Roald Dahl Day and World Book Day (see our Twitter for more information @DT_BlacklowBrow)

For the Love of Reading

Everyday the children have time to listen to their class teacher, or a guest reader, read to them in class. This means, that during the academic year children get to listen and experience 6 high quality texts being read to them in a manner that models good habits and techniques.

Reading for Pleasure  

Reading for Pleasure means any reading that is primarily for enjoyment. This includes: books, magazines, comics, poems, picture books, newspapers as well as fiction novels. Research has shown that reading for pleasure can result in increased empathy, improved relationships with others, improved wellbeing and increased insight into the view and opinions of others. At Blacklow Brow, we know that young children who enjoy reading independently will have had the door opened to new discoveries and wider interests as well as to new knowledge, creativity and confidence. We believe Reading for Pleasure is of the utmost importance and it is something that we actively and continuously promote in many different ways throughout our school. To support this we have invested in a Reading shed and a Storytime area where children and parents can read before and after school as well as at break and lunch.

Reading Lessons

Reading lessons take part during our timetabled English time that happens every morning. Children have 1 full lesson each day where they explore their class reader. All children access a text that is vocabulary rich and that is appropriate for their year group.

 

 

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