Headteacher’s Welcome

Reading starts on the first day when children join Rectory Farm Primary School. 

We have designed our reading curriculum around the two core strands as outlined in the Scarborough Reading Rope: Word Recognition and Language Comprehension in order to teach our children to read.  

Word Recognition and Early Reading 

To develop children’s ability to recognise and decode words we use the Little Wandle Revised Letters and Sounds Programme as our implementation strategy. 

Children in EYFS and KS1 receive a daily 30-minute phonics lesson as well as a minimum of 2 small group reading sessions using a decodable text. The lowest 20% are monitored and carefully assessed with timely and appropriate interventions being put in place such as pre-teaching. They are also heard read more frequently. 

Any child who needs additional practice receives daily keep-up support from a trained adult. Keep-up lessons match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures, resources, and mantras, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every child secures their learning. 

Y3 children, who are not fully fluent readers or have not passed the phonics screening check, also receive a daily phonic lesson. 

Every child has access to a phonetically decodable book which is suitable for their reading attainment as well as a reading for pleasure book. These books are routinely monitored by the class teacher. 

Additionally, the purpose of these books is to introduce our readers to chapter books, where they can read and meet real authors, so that their love of reading grows. These books are designed as a step towards developing a love and independence of reading.

Our stage books draw from a range of schemes and publishers. This is to promote choice and variety within our children’s reading diets.  

Eventually, as children become more proficient at reading, their need for the decodable books will lessen until they are only reading the stage books. The table below shows the expected stage books to be read by the end of each year at RFPS: 

Reading Comprehension

 The explicit teaching of reading happens daily where children are taught specific reading skills, which enable them to become fluent readers. The key skills are taught according to a progression across school as shown below: 

Comprehension skills are embedded over time and build on previous learning. These skills support children in understanding the text more deeply. Our approach to teaching reading builds up over the course of the week, starting with children being supported by the teacher and moves towards the children applying the skills they have learned in a weekly comprehensive task each Friday. 

Our children are exposed to engaging texts that help to support learning in lesson. The quality of the text is pivotal to the success of the reading sequence and there is an expectation that is it ambitious, rich, and effectively assessed for its teaching potential

As children move into Key Stage 2, increased emphasis is placed on modelling written responses and children will become more familiar with the test-type questions through the teacher’s carefully selected use of sentence stems.

We use Herts 4 learning as a strategy to work with any children that need ‘catch-up’ interventions with their comprehension. This focuses on the way in which we use prosody when we read. The children will experience lots of practise of reading aloud alongside the adult and on their own.  

Daily ‘Love of Reading’ sessions enable learners to share a book of interest with an adult or peer, selecting from recommended reads, high-quality non-fiction books, poems, newspapers and comics. 

During the school day, the children have time to change their stage book; additional times are available for those enthusiastic readers and devourers of books. We are fortunate to have a school librarian, who supports the children with their reading choices and each class has a time to visit the library and learn how to access the reading material.