“The more you read, the more things you know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” Dr Suess
We believe that reading has many benefits. It enables you to access and learn about the world. It improves your vocabulary and communication. It develops your imagination and creativity. It helps you build relationships. It improves your self-esteem.
As a school, we ensure that all our pupils experience success in reading, in a personalised way, whatever their starting point. We do this as follows:
Pre-Reading and Writing Skills
To ensure our pupils have the skills to access formal synthetic phonics, our curriculum provides the opportunity to develop pre-reading and writing skills. This can include:
Building and developing attention
Turn taking
Learning about sound in everyday contexts
Extended and embedded vocabulary and story language
Recognising text and images
Handling books
Developing fine and gross motor skills
Instilling a love of and interest in books.
Synthetic Phonics
Once pupils are developmentally ready they move onto Read Write Inc or Freshstart to further enhance their skills and understanding of phonics. Whilst phonics sessions are taught discreetly as part of our daily Communication and Literacy sessions, pupils practise decoding words throughout the school day.
Language Comprehension
Alongside formal synthetic phonics, our pupils develop language comprehension and word recognition skills. Reading sessions establish background knowledge, key vocabulary and understanding of literacy concepts and genres. Our pupils are enabled to understand the structure of language and apply verbal reasoning. For some pupils, sight recognition is used to complement their overall development of word recognition.
A Text Rich Approach
Reading continues to be taught throughout the curriculum via a text rich topic based approach. Our book-based curriculum not only develops reading but provides a meaningful context for writing. Pupils are encouraged to explore the contexts, structure and features, thematic content and big ideas in texts. Daily reading slots enhance pupils' independence and love of reading.
Reading Spaces
In order to engender a culture of reading Greenacre has designated reading spaces such as our reading den, reading corners and library. Pupils access our reading club, and are part of our reading ambassador group.