Teaching children to read is of paramount importance at Hampton Infant School and Nursery. We believe reading is a life enhancing skill that is the entitlement of every child. We offer a balanced and creative, yet systematic, approach to the teaching of reading throughout the school; one which provides children with a teaching and application of phonics, alongside a focus on exploring comprehension, meaning and reading for enjoyment. We encourage children to love books, to love reading, to love finding out information and to love sharing stories together.
At Hampton Infant School and Nursery we start to teach reading in Nursery – this involves handling books, sharing stories, talking about books, storytelling including books on our displays, labelling areas and objects in the classroom and basic phonic recognition. Children are also encouraged to borrow books for story sharing sessions at home. These approaches are continued into Reception, with children also progressing onto daily phonics lessons at the start of the autumn term, where they are taught using a systematic, synthetic phonic approach as the prime strategy to develop word recognition. This high quality phonics teaching is continued throughout the school, with children being taught in a clear, carefully planned approach in order to ensure they have very targeted and appropriate support and challenge at all times. The expectation is that they will have secured word recognition skills and be fluent readers, with good comprehension, by the end of KS1.
Borrow a book: A reading for pleasure choice for Nursery to Year 2
Children choose a book to take home and share with an adult as either a shared reading experience or a bedtime story. At all stages teachers plan a series of reading activities for pupils to complete to enable them to read and comprehend a range of different texts. Children are also offered individual reading sessions with staff on a weekly basis.
The school is committed to investing in reading materials. The school has recently invested in new reading books. The children can also access Oxford reading buddy – online reading scheme at home. These books are all levelled, allowing teachers to gradually increase the challenge offered to children, whilst maintaining the correct level of support to allow each child a sense of achievement and aid their reading comprehension. ICT equipment has been recently updated to include I-PADs and Chromebooks, which now allow children to access electronic reading materials in all curriculum subjects.
We think it is important that the school environment reflects a positive attitude to reading and children are given lots of opportunities to apply their reading across the curriculum, both within the indoor and outdoor learning environments. Each class has a reading area where children can select books, listen to stories and talk about the books they enjoy reading. The children develop a love of reading and experience a range of books and different authors. Parental involvement in reading is encouraged through home-school reading diaries aiding two-way communication. We hold a variety of reading workshops over the year to share information about the development steps of early reading and how reading skills are taught in school and ways in which they can be supported at home.
Phonics
Phonics consists of the skills of segmentation and blending, knowledge of the alphabetic code and understanding of the principles which underpin how children learn to read and spell. The children in EYFS and Year 1 receive daily phonics sessions through supportive, differentiated group work.
In Nursery the children are developing their communication, language and literacy skills over the course of the year in preparation for learning letter sounds. We play a variety of games and activities with the children and music has a key part in developing children’s language. Most are adult led activities and the way we model speaking and listening, interact and talk with the children is critical to the success of our early phonics activities . We also provide opportunities on a daily basis for child initiated learning where the children can play and explore their new found skills. This plays a very important part in their development. The emphasis is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills.
Reception and Year 1, teachers use progressive planning including principles laid out in the Sounds Write scheme. Focused activities allow children to revisit, learn, practise and apply their knowledge and understanding through fun and engaging games and activities. Pupils are systematically taught the phonemes (sounds), how to blend the sounds through words for reading, and how to segment the sounds for spelling.
When children reach the summer term of Year 1, their phonic knowledge is assessed through the statutory phonics screening check. It can also be repeated during Year 2 to monitor progress and identify those children in need of intervention.
When children reach Year 2 they will still receive regular phonics sessions however these are taught as a whole class. Any children who require additional support will be given precision teaching sessions with an adult in a small group or one to one. This is to ensure these valuable reading and spelling skills are embedded and children are confident moving forward after they finish KS1.
