.png)
Reading
The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.
- Dr Seuss
The ability to read, acquire knowledge and understand what is read makes up the foundation of our reading curriculum. At Hurworth Primary, our aim is for all pupils – irrespective of their needs, abilities or backgrounds – to be able to learn to read fluently, effectively, confidently and with understanding.
At Hurworth Primary, reading is at the heart of our curriculum. Through our reading, we aim to encourage the children to develop culturally, emotionally, socially and spiritually. We want all children, from Reception to Year 6, to learn the skills and knowledge to enable them to read and to develop a lifelong love of reading that develops into secondary school and adulthood. We want to expose our children to the power of words and structure of language at every opportunity, engaging critically and imaginatively with a range of texts to help children make sense of the world and their place in it. From the important foundations in our systematic and structured phonics program to our range of class novels, school library, author visits, celebrated book days and interactions with our local library and book shop, we make sure our school highlights the importance of reading.
All of our children are taught the skills to decode words and to understand what they have read. We want to develop our children into skilled readers, intertwining the strands of decoding and comprehension (see Scarborough’s Reading Rope below).
Reading transforms the human brain, which transforms the mind, which transforms the life of every reader.
Our Intent for Reading
Our aim is to encourage all children to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction texts, developing their knowledge of themselves and the world in which they live, establishing an appreciation and love of reading, gaining knowledge across the curriculum and intertwining their comprehension skills with their decoding skills. We want to ensure that, by the end of their primary education, all children are able to read fluently, and with confidence, in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education and to develop further reading skills to support them throughout life. At Hurworth Primary, we do this by ensuring:
1. A range of engaging and challenging texts from a range of genres are accessed by our children which promote a love of reading, act as excellent models for language and embrace a wide range of cultures and time periods.
2. Children become fluent and age appropriate readers across Early Years and Key Stage 1 through a fully embedded and progressive phonic scheme as well as exposure to appropriate texts to build on further reading skills.
3. Children reach the expected standard in Year 1 phonics with word reading fluency being the most important focus in the curriculum. This will then allow our children to build on their understanding of what they have read by exposing them to an increasing range of vocabulary and developing their comprehension skills ready for Key Stage Two.
4. All children in Key Stage Two will access class novels and weekly extracts with coverage of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. All children access their own reading books suitable to their age and stage.
Phonics at Hurworth Primary
At Hurworth Primary School, we strive to ensure that almost all children learn the phonetic code. We use the Little Wandle Letters and Revised scheme of learning to deliver our progressive phonics teaching. This complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) teaches children to decode (read) and encode (spell). Our systematic phonics provision allows the literary and wider world to open up to the children whilst meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum and preparing children to go beyond the expectations of the Phonics Screening Check. More information on the 'Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised' scheme for parents can be found here.
These four videos show you how to pronounce the sounds. Notice how the children don’t add an ‘uh’ sound at the end, so they say: ‘t’ not ‘tuh’.
The videos below show you how we teach your child specific aspects of phonics in class.
The video below shows you all about how to support your child with reading, including information about their reading books and Share a Story books.
For more information about reading and phonics in Reception and Year 1, please visit the year group pages by clicking on the links.
Parents as Readers
Sharing books with your children has a huge impact on them as readers, but so does being a fantastic reading role model! Help your child understand that reading is important by letting them see you reading maps, books, recipes, and directions. Suggest reading as a free-time activity.
You could always visit our parent library (situated at the main entrance) to pick up some new books. Visiting with your child before or after school will help to show how important reading is to you too!