Intent

Our intent is to deliver the reading and phonetic specific content of the English programmes set out in the national curriculum. 

Implementation

We implement this through embedding essential reading and phonetic skills, such as retrieval and inference, whilst exploring chosen texts in a whole class setting. 

Impact

The impact of this is that our pupils become confident, critical readers who engage deeply with a wide range of texts. 

Phonics  

As a school, we follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised scheme. This is a very highly structured, instructional approach to teaching children to read and spell and the medium term plans for each year group can be found in the attachments below. 

Reading Schemes     

Throughout Early Years and Key Stage One, we have used a series of reading programmes to build our own reading scheme. The purpose behind this is to ensure the children have access to a range of text types and genres whilst developing their early reading skills.

The four reading series we use are:

Each child will take home two reading books per week. These two books will be a combination of books from the above series. All books broadly align with the sequence of phonics teaching in Reception and Year 1. 

Children in Key Stage Two are expected to read daily at home which is monitored through our class reading challenges. Pupils read daily within school across the curriculum with a specific focus during whole class reading.

Love of Reading 

From their first day at Trinity, children are exposed to high quality books. In Reception and Year One, children are read to daily using carefully chosen books, poems and traditional tales, nurturing a love of reading through rhyme, repetition and choral response. This is also reinforced through story mapping. The use of story mapping helps children orally retell stories and promotes an environment where reading is valued and enjoyed.  ​​​

From Year Two and beyond, this love of reading is fostered through our Whole Class Reading sessions and the careful planning of high quality texts that are built into our Wider Curriculum. For example, in Year 3 the children will read 'The Egyptian Cinderella' by Shirley Climo during their Walk Like an Egyptian topic; in Year 4 they will learn a series of Caribbean Folk tales during their Cruising the Caribbean  topic; and in Year 6 they have weekly 'Reading for Knowledge' sessions based on a series of high quality poetry and non-fiction texts, specifically chosen to enrich cultural capital. 

Whole Class Reading

In Years 2 to 6, the reading content domains are explicitly taught during whole class reading sessions.

Below is an overview of the books we read across the school: 

 

Once decoding is secure, research suggests that reading ability is almost entirely based upon pupils’ own background knowledge.

We therefore use Knowledge Organisers in our whole class reading sessions which help scaffold building contextual knowledge around the text.