Reading at the Barford and Bawburgh Federation
Statement of intent:
At Bawburgh, we strongly believe that reading is an essential life skill and foundational to learning. We are passionate about creating a reading for pleasure culture within our school and strive for all children to enjoy and value it. It is our aim to develop and create passionate readers for life who are able to discover and pursue their individual talents and interests through their love of reading. By the end of their primary education, we intend for all children to read fluently and with confidence, to prepare them for their forthcoming secondary education and beyond.
As a school we aim to:
- Foster an enthusiasm for and love of reading for life.
- Enable children to read with confidence, accuracy, fluency, understanding and enjoyment.
- To ensure that all children are taught to read at the appropriate level and that reading with a teacher is not simply an opportunity to practise.
- To identify accurate stages of attainment in reading for each child.
- To ensure that all children have an appropriate and challenging reading target set according to their reading stage.
- To develop comprehension skills of inference and deduction.
- That all children have an opportunity to access high quality and engaging literature in order to support them with making good or accelerated progress.
Implementation:
Phonics
At the Barford and Bawburgh Federation, we teach phonics through the DfE validated Monster Phonics Scheme . Monster Phonics is a unique approach to teaching phonics, using colour to consistently code for key graphemes in English. Colour shows children how to pronounce the most difficult aspects of reading. It is unique in that it uses character (monster) phoneme cues and colour coding to represent the long vowel sounds, silent letters and tricky letters. With Monster Phonics, spellings are more memorable and learning to read and spell becomes exciting and fun!
Phonics Progression Maps:
Guided/ Whole Class Reading
EYFS
In the EYFS, children are provided with opportunities to develop essential reading skills in preparation for KS1. These skills are nurtured through phonics, story explorer sessions, and engaging play activities like role-playing familiar stories and reading in the reading corner. Phonics instruction focuses on vital early reading skills, such as recognising high-frequency words by sight and practising fluent sentence re-reading. During story time, adults emphasise prosody by modeling expressive reading with appropriate intonation. This approach is reinforced through regular echo reading and drama activities in the classroom.
Guided Reading – Year 1
In Year 1, children continue to develop important skills for reading following the Monster Phonics guided reading programme. Each week there are three timetabled sessions for guided reading. Children work in small groups to read their focus book with each session focussing on a different skill, these include: developing fluency, prosody and comprehension skills. At the end of the week, children take their book home to share with their family
Whole Class Reading – Year 2-6
In Years 2-6, whole-class reading lessons are designed to engage pupils with high-quality, challenging texts selected by the teacher. Through in-depth discussions and high-level questioning, students analyse these texts to enhance their understanding. Lessons incorporate a variety of activities aimed at improving reading fluency, expanding vocabulary, and strengthening comprehension skills. Each session is explicitly aligned with the reading domains, with the teacher modeling specific reading strategies for pupils to develop.
