Reading
Subject Lead: Miss Holly McGowan
At Stanley Park Infants’, we value reading as a key life skill. By the time children leave us, they should be confident selecting and reading a wide range of material and enjoy regularly reading for pleasure. Our readers are equipped with the tools to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary and material. They can recommend books to their peers and enjoy reading a wide range of genres, including non-fiction. Children enjoy participating in discussions about books and learn many off by heart.
We use a variety of reading materials and schemes (including Scholastic book bands, Song Birds, Ditty books, Bug Club, Cracking Comprehension and class Kindle books) to support children with their reading.
How we teach Reading
We teach reading in several ways. Reading lessons will always include:
Opportunities to read for pleasure.
Phonics in small groups or interventions.
Storytime timetabled for fifteen minutes a day, at least three times a week.
Regular, open ended discussions about stories and books.
Opportunities to read and discuss a wide read of genres including poetry and non-fiction.
Specific teaching of reading comprehension skills including answering retrieval and inference questions – a program called Cracking Comprehension is used in Year 2.
We also have a number of reading enrichment activities, including:
Visits from authors and poets throughout the school year.
Celebrations for World Book Week including ‘Books Before Bedtime’, competitions and lots of amazing costumes!
In addition, 1:1 reading is put in place for children that need extra practise. Books that the children take home are carefully chosen to match the children’s interests and their level of fluency.
Reading for pleasure at SPIS
Reading for pleasure is highly promoted at SPIS and children enjoy reading a wide range of texts. Each class displays the book they are currently reading on their classroom door and this builds up to become a library of texts they have read throughout the year.
Learning Environment
At Stanley Park Infants' we pride ourselves in our stimulating and immersive learning environment to enhance children's love of stories and encourage them to grow up into lifelong readers. Above shows some photographs of our reading area's to give children a calm and cosy place to enjoy books with their peers. Children are able to choose from a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books, including picture books, chapter books, short stories, poetry books, fact books, science magazines and many more.
'Handa's Surprise' by Eileen Browne is the focus story in Year 1 in the Autumn term and Year 2 read 'Where The Wild Things Are' by Maurice Sendak. Children are Memory Masters learning these stories inside out and these are key texts for cross curricular learning. Above shows some of our corridor displays showing some of the scenes from these stories.
Book Week
Each year at SPI we have a special week dedicated to our love of reading to share and promote reading for pleasure among our children. This year our theme was 'Rhythm and Rhyme' with a focus on the author Julia Donaldson. We began our week with an exciting assembly, discussing our favourite types of books, finding out why Julia Donaldson's stories are special, what activities we would be doing this week! The children were thrilled to hear the main focus was Julia Donaldson as she is a very popular author and they could name lots of her book titles and characters.
To promote a love of reading we started the week with a book carousel in our year groups where the children could hear a range of Julia Donaldson stories. The children visited each of the teachers and teaching assistants in their classrooms to listen and read along to books such as 'Paper Dolls', 'Zog', 'The Gruffalo' and 'The Singing Mermaid'.
Throughout the week classes were able to participate in a character scavenger hunt as lots of Julia Donaldson's characters had escaped their stories and were hiding around our school! We also had a dress up day where we could come to school dressed as our favourite book character and share our favourite stories with our friends. The teachers all dressed up as different Julia Donaldson characters too!
Our biggest celebration in Book Week is always Books Before Bedtime. Children were invited back to school in the evening in their pyjamas to listen to some bedtime stories with their teachers whilst enjoying some treats and chocolate milk. Then our teachers put on a show of a well known story, this year we chose 'The Gruffalo'. It was such a special event and always lots of fun. Take a look at some of our pictures below to see all the fun activities we had in Book Week!
Reading communities:
· Participation in local reading competitions including the summer reading challenge.
· Visits to the school library every half term.
· Book fairs every term- children are timetabled in for browsing sessions.
· Access to their teachers reading stories on the school website.
· Participation in World Book Week dress up and enrichment events based on the national theme.
· Reading buddies- teaming up older and younger classes to share favourite books together.
Reading environments and choice:
· An engaging, clearly labelled, tidy book corner with a range of classic and new, high-quality fiction and non-fiction texts.
· Advice on how to choose a book that they will like and exposure to new authors and genres.
· Time every week to choose a book and read for pleasure.
· Dedicated time each day where an adult will read to them.
· Time each week to read to an adult and other children in the classroom.
· Daily opportunities to engage in quality book talk.
Author visits/ Workshops:
· Regular author/ storyteller visits- every child will access at least one author event per year.
Teacher Commitment:
· Teachers who have regular training sessions and are kept up to date with pedagogical developments.
· Enthusiastic teachers with good knowledge of children’s books and enjoy participating in book talk.
· Teachers who are motivated and participate wholeheartedly in reading enrichment activities such as World Book Day.
· Teachers who model the love of reading!
Let us read to you!
Listen to some of the SPIS team read some books for World Book Day. We love to share stories everyday and these are some videos recorded during school closure so children at home could enjoy a book with their teachers.