Burnley Road Academy Reading

Intent

At Burnley Road Academy, we believe that reading is an essential life skill, and do our best to ensure pupils are given the greatest opportunities to develop this, in the hope that they will become life-long readers, who read confidently for meaning and regularly enjoy reading for pleasure, with the skill set necessary to tackle everyday situations that rely on reading. We encourage our children to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose.

We also develop our school values by encouraging pupils to have the courage and perseverance to have a go, to challenge themselves and keep trying, even when it is difficult, and they make mistakes. Our pupils show compassion and teamwork when working with partners and buddies or reading aloud in class. Compassion is further developed through carefully chosen texts.

We believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. Therefore, we have chosen to teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Nursery/Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. We also have a strong focus on language development for our children because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.

From the start of school life, Burnley Road Academy aims to broaden pupils' experience of books, both fiction and non-fiction. This continues as our children progress through the school. As their reading skills develop, we teach pupils to consider the language and meaning of text. This change in reading from a surface approach (gathering information) to a deeper approach (understanding and interpreting) is essential to gain the most out of texts. Reading becomes not simply a way to see what is written, but to recognise and interpret what is said, considering subtleties such as bias, assumptions, and the perspectives of the author.

Burnley Road Academy:

• Understands how a strong grounding in reading will impact the future learning and development of a pupil in all subjects and prepare them for life in modern society.
• Provides a broad and balanced curriculum, which includes fluency in the use of phonics, reading practice, widening vocabulary, reading for different purposes, reading a variety of genres, as well as focussing on standard and non-standard pronunciation.
• Ensures that all teachers are aware of teaching, learning and assessment requirements for the development of reading.
• Develops children’s reading stamina, so that children can read for longer periods of time, appropriate to their age, and across a range of genres.

Implementation

Early Reading is taught using the validated scheme 'Little Wandle'. Children take part in daily phonics lessons, then read books (matched to their phonic learning stage) three times within the week, before taking them home to celebrate a successful fourth read with their parents. Interventions are quickly put in place for children that need extra support. When children have successfully learned to decode they move on to our next main scheme, 'Oxford Reading Tree'. We have a good range of supplementary books that run alongside this. Children read these books with adults in class and at home. All children take library books home to share with their families and read for pleasure. 

Guided reading takes place weekly covering a broad range of genres. Comprehension skills are taught explicitly using a system called VIPERS - a series of question types that focus on different aspects of comprehension (see further information below). Reading for pleasure is seen as an essential part of learning to read well, so adults regularly read a variety of high quality books to their classes (see the Repeated Texts section below).   

Impact

Our reading results are usually in line with national standards at Ks1 and Ks2.  Phonics results are also in line with national. Our school effectiveness recently monitored early reading for children in Years 1,2 and 3. She found that “all the pupils involved said they enjoy books, they smiled with enthusiasm and talked positively about reading. Pupils readily talked about what they had been reading and they were able to use cues to predict what might happen in the books. Pupils can recall what they have read. The pupils are developing their comprehension skills and they talk about motives and feelings of characters.”