Reading and Early Reading

Reading and Early Reading

Reading offers children a lifetime of enjoyment and learning. At Dilton Marsh C of E Primary School we aim to promote a love of reading and feel that children discovering books and how to use and enjoy them is crucial to their development. It is essential that our approach to teaching phonics and reading is accessible to all learners, regardless of background. Every child matters and teaching them to read the word will enable them to read the world.

Early Reading

Through our progression of phonics teaching and learning, as well as the children reading fully decodable books using Little Wandle Letters and Sounds books, we ensure that our children become fluent readers. As children become more fluent and confident readers, they progress to our 'step-on books'. 
 
Reading For Pleasure
Reading improves all of a child’s literacy skills and can offer them a lifetime of enjoyment and learning. At Dilton Marsh C of E Primary School we aim to promote a love of reading and feel that children discovering books and how to use and enjoy them is crucial to their development. e 'Dilton 50' for each year group. We have a carefully selected list of recommended books for each class, known as the 'Dilton 50' - these help to ensure access to a variety of genres and authors. We encourage the reading of these books in addition to their decodable books. 
 

Reading at Home

We use our home/school contact books to record what we have been reading at home. Our expectation is that children read at least 4 times a week at home - record books should be signed by an adult to confirm this. For younger readers, we encourage them to read their matched Little Wandle decodable book at home three times to develop their fluency, prosody and comprehension. In addition, our early readers also take home a sharing book to enjoy with an adult at home.
 
From year 2 onwards, as children's de-coding and fluency develops, children will take a book from the class 'step-on readers' and then, in turn from their class libraries. This may be in addition to reading books from home. However, we strongly encourage children to always share what they are reading with their class teacher and have an open discussion about their reading choices. We offer reading rewards to children who are regular readers.
Reading Comprehension
From year 2, we use ‘Teaching Comprehension Strategies’ which exposes the children to extracts of different text types enabling the teaching of explicit skills needed to understand the texts, as well as answer reading comprehension questions orally and in writing. We accompany this teaching with specific vocabulary lessons and discussions to ensure that the children fully understand the text.