Reading

At Cotford St Luke Primary School we strive to instil a love of reading into our pupils. We have daily opportunities for independent reading in KS2 and alongside an adult in KS1. Each class has a variety of books that children can access independently to explore in an age appropriate way. Guided reading takes place across the whole school.

We strongly encourage reading at home with your child and books are regularly changed in school. If your child is a reluctant reader, you could try some of the following:

• Explore magazines, newspapers, supermarket signs- reading materials in different formats.
• Explore Audiobooks- these allow children to listen to a story and enjoy the storyline.
• There are plenty of websites that give free access to E-Books. Oxford Owl would be a good one to explore https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/find-a-book/library-page/. Some children may engage more in this format.

Phonics

What is phonics?

Phonics is a way of teaching children how to read and write. It helps children hear, identify and use different sounds that distinguish one word from another in the English language. Understanding phonics will also help children know which letters to use when they are writing words.

Phonics is all about learning the sounds that letters can make. There are 44 sounds in the English language, which we put together to form words.

Some are represented by one letter, like ‘t’ and some by two or more, like ‘ck’ in duck and ‘air’ in chair.

Children are taught the sounds first, then how to match them to letters, and finally how to use the letter sounds for reading and spelling.

Phonics at our school

At Cotford St Luke Primary School we use the multisensory systematic synthetic programme Monster Phonics.  Monster Phonics uses a colour coded grapheme system linked to monster characters.

The resources are mapped against the Letters and Sounds phases 2-6 and the KS1 Spelling Curriculum. The colour-coded grapheme system is unique to Monster Phonics; each coloured grapheme is paired with a monster character that makes the same sound to give audio-visual prompts that help children ‘see’ each sounds within a word and pronounce it correctly.

We follow the Monster Phonics programme in Reception and Key Stage 1. The children will have a daily phonics lesson, full of exciting, purposeful, multisensory phonics teaching and learning experiences. The Monster Phonics intervention programme, resources and teaching strategies are also used across Key Stage Two.

Accelerated Reader

Once your child has completed the Monster Phonics programme and has read through the stages of books they will join our Accelerated Reader programme. Your child will take an online quiz at the beginning of each term which will give them a ZPD range. This is the range of books from which your child can choose. Once they have read the book they will take another short multiple choice quiz to check they have understood what they have read. As a school we have a benchmark pass rate of 85% for these quizzes. If your child scores below this they may need a slightly easier book but if they score 90-100% they may need something a little more challenging.

Guided Reading 

In Reception, the children are introduced to the different skills, in the summer term before moving to whole class Guided Reading in Year 1. 

When exploring comprehension activities we explore VIPERS to ensure children have a clear understanding of the text they are reading. VIPERS is an acronym for Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Sequence or Summarise. They are key areas that children need to know and understand in order to comprehend a text fully. Please see examples below if you would like to explore them with your children at home.

Key Stage One

https://www.literacyshedplus.com/en-gb/resource/reading-vipers-question-stems-ks1

Key Stage Two

https://www.literacyshedplus.com/en-gb/resource/reading-vipers-question-stems-ks2

As a whole school we have read the book 'The Reading Tree' by Paul Czajak and it inspired us to create a book tree of our own in our library space. With lots of new books coming into our library thanks to our sponsored read event for World Book Day we wanted to create something as a whole school to demonstrate our love of books and reading! We think it looks marvellous and we can't wait to keep adding stories we write or love to it!