- Admissions
- British Values
- Catch-up Premium
- Contact Us
- Complaints Procedures
- Curriculum
- Pre-school
- Reception
- Year 1
- Year 2
- Year 3
- Year 4
- Year 5
- Year 6
- Progress at Windwhistle Primary School
- Reading at Windwhistle Primary School
- Equality Objectives
- Extend Learning Academies Network
- Financial Benchmarking
- School Performance
- Governors
- Ofsted
- Policies
- Privacy Notice
- Prospectus
- Pupil Premium & Sports Premium
- Vacancies
- Vision and Aims
- Who's who - the staff team
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