Reading at Windwhistle Primary School

We want our pupils to develop a love of reading that will be a lifelong pleasure for them.  Evidence suggests that children who read for enjoyment every day not only perform better in reading tests than those who don’t, but also develop a broader vocabulary, increased general knowledge and a better understanding of other cultures.  In fact, there’s evidence to suggest that reading for pleasure is more likely to determine whether a child does well at school than their social or economic background.

 There are two main aspects to learning to read:

• that the reader recognises and understands the words on the page (that is, word recognition or decoding)
• the development of language comprehension (that is text is understood and interpreted)

So, at Windwhistle we have a team of staff who ensure that children’s reading skills are developed to their maximum, alongside a range of opportunities to read for pleasure including an enthusiastic librarian who runs the library at lunchtimes as well as working with groups of children every afternoon.

We have taken a series of actions to make this happen:

• Every child working within the Programme for Phonics into Early Spelling has a high quality daily 15-20 minute discrete, interactive phonics session
• We use Big Cat Phonics and Oxford Reading Tree Reading Scheme as our core schemes
  
• Better Reading Partners
  
• Booster Phonics
• Five Minute box
  
• Prioritising boys for reading intervention support (as they generally achieve less well than girls in reading)
  
• Parents from Reception learn activities they can use with their child at home to practise their phonics skills
  
• Promote the use of the library to boys with competitions
  
• KS1 visit the library at lunchtime with the play scheme leader
  
• Purchasing reading resources other than books (eg comics and magazines) to attract less able readers, including Kindle trial in KS2
  
• Purchasing new texts to extend and interest more able readers