Overview

We believe that reading should be at the heart of our curriculum.

It is our intent to foster a LOVE of reading among our pupils and to engage and immerse our children in high quality texts across the curriculum. 

Phonics

Phonics at St Paul's is taught through a highly structured, systematic approach of daily lessons based on Letters and Sounds. 

The Letters and Sounds scheme is grouped into phases and pupils progress from phase 1 to phase 6. These phases ensure that children progress from talking about and exploring sounds, through to understanding what graphemes and phonemes are. Pupils learn about GPCs (grapheme-phoneme correspondences), consonant digraphs, vowel digraphs and trigraphs. Children develop knowledge of how to blend and segment the phonemes within words, including those with adjacent consonants. Within phase 5, pupils progress to learning about split digraphs, alternative pronunciations of the same grapheme, and alternative representations of the same phoneme. Phase 6  begins in Year 2 and concentrates on developing spelling rules and enhancing reading strategies. The reading and spelling of high frequency words are taught throughout EYFS and KS1,  along with how to spell tricky words which may not fit conventional spelling rules.

Phonics is taught in a variety of ways, including high quality modelling of sounding out, decoding, segmenting and blending strategies. Interactive resources and games are used and children are given the opportunity to rehearse sounds verbally and record them in written work.

Phonics sessions are structured to build on previous learning and introduce new phonics skills and subject knowledge. Sessions often follow the revisit/review, teach, practise and apply model. Sessions are planned to include opportunities for development of speaking and listening, reading and writing.

Each June, all children in Year 1 undertake a National Phonics Screening Check. This check consists of 40 words (20 real words and 20 pseudo words) which all children will be asked to read. The focus of this check is to see if pupils can decode a range of words which they have not seen before

Reading Schemes

We base our HOME reading scheme on Oxford Reading Tree. We believe that children who are early readers, develop faster by having access to books which are 100% decodable. Children in the early years of education at St Paul's will have access to picture books to promote high quality 'book talk' before introducing them to the Oxford characters with our 'Floppy's Phonics' books. We have these books in every level up to phase 5 phonics but will supplement them with 'decode and develop' texts until children are at a stage where they can decode independently and can therefore access levelled books which are not fully decodable. 

Home Reading

At St Paul's we take Home Reading very seriously. We believe in developing a strong partnership between home and school and children in all year groups take home books which we monitor and change weekly (or where appropriate in KS2). Please sign your child's record and add a comment. Staff will also do this weekly. Don't forget to tell us about anything else you are enjoying reading at home. 

Guided Reading

At our school, we have put raising attainment in reading as one of our main school improvement priorities. One way we are pushing reading is through daily Guided Reading sessions. You may hear your child refer to this as the  'Big Read'. Every class from Y1-Y6 has 30 minutes of high quality teaching every day. Children are split into ability groups of around 6 and will have access to one of our Guided Reading texts. The scheme we follow for this is Pearson Bug Club but we supplement this with real texts, poetry, Rapid Readers, Collins Big Cat and Project X. During Guided Reading, there will be at least 3 adults in the room working with children on decoding and then comprehension. This means that we can make sure these sessions have a real impact. 

Class Novels/Story Time

For the academic year 2019-20, every class has pledged to dedicate time to a daily class story or novel. We feel that this is such an important time - we are using this time to share high quality texts with children, often at a level higher than they are actually reading independently so they are accessing some amazing vocabulary. 

Curriculum and Learning Environment

At St Paul's we are working hard to provide quality, text rich learning environments for your children. We are having a major focus on vocabulary across the curriculum and this is reflected in our displays. 

We believe that our curriculum should be based on high quality texts which engage the children in OUR school. 

Reading to your child

"If you read just one book a day to your child, they will have been read 1825 books by their 5th birthday." Imagine how many books this will mean by their 11th birthday?

Every day counts.

Every book counts. 

Don't stop reading to your child, just because they can read by themselves. 

Developing a love of reading

This is intrinsic to all we do at St Paul's. Over the last year we have invited published authors and poets into school to work with our children. We have invested money in our fabulous library and all KS2 children have access to this. We celebrate World Book Day and National Poetry Day every year in our school. Ask your child what they have been reading in school this week.