Reading

Our aim is to provide children with opportunities that will foster a love of reading. From the very beginning, we work on the two aspects of reading, decoding and comprehension so that we can enable children to read fluently and with good understanding of what they have read. Initially we focus on decoding through teaching phonics. As the children move into to Year 2, we focus increasingly on fluency. This is to ensure that they are reading with sufficient speed and accuracy to be able to understand what they are reading. Children who read fluently read accurately, automatically (at a reasonable speed) and with prosody (what they read sounds like natural speech). Each year group will focus on the relevant reading skills set out by the National Curriculum.

As a school, we believe in the value of reading out loud to the children as often as possible. We use Pie Corbett’s reading spine as a basis to select texts to read, but each teacher will also choose books that they believe will appeal to the interests of their class. Children also have frequent opportunities to read independently. All of our classrooms have a well-stocked library and we also have a whole-school library. The children visit the library to return and withdraw books weekly.

Our Reading Scheme

We have a wide variety of books from different schemes and where possible, we encourage the children to select books that appeal to them. In EYFS and Year 1, our scheme is decodable so that the children can reinforce their phonics knowledge when reading independently. It is split into an EYFS and Key Stage One section and a Key Stage Two section. This ensures that children are reading books that are suitable for their age and interests as they move through the school. We keep a selection of chapter and non-fiction books for those children who come to the end of our Key Stage One scheme in Year 2 to ensure that they are still reading a wide variety of texts. Once children in Year 3 and 4 have come to the end of our scheme, they become Flying Readers who can select books from home, the class library or our school library. We have a system of bingo cards to encourage the children to try different genres.

Phonics

By reading stories aloud to children every day, you are forming a link for them between reading, comfort and love. When you love a book, your children will want to hear it again and again! Children thrive on repetition, so when you’ve read Room on the Broom for the hundredth time, remember you are hardwiring their brains for success." 

(Ruth Miskin, 2019) 

 We are committed to every child learning to read as quickly as possible. We are extremely proud of our high achieving Phonics Screening Check results in Year 1. 

We use the highly successful Read Write Inc. Phonics programme to teach our children to read, write and spell. Our children do well in the phonics screening check and by Year 2, the majority are fluent readers with the best chance of success in the end of Key Stage 1 tests. 

Read Write Inc sessions take place each day for all Reception and Year 1 children with no exceptions, as the pace and consistency of the programme is a key element to developing reading skills for all children which is integral to effectively learn the rest of the school curriculum. 

Our ultimate aims and objectives within the Read Write Inc programme are for the children to be able to learn and apply sound blending skills and to learn to segment words in order to be able to create skilled and confident readers. Children also learn to read and spell words that do not conform to regular phonetic patterns (High Frequency Words) and decode both fiction and non-fiction texts through discussion, performance and teacher led activities. 

Common Exception Words

We explicitly teach the spelling of common exception, or tricky, words to the children from Year 1 to Year 4. These are words that have unusual letter-sound correspondences, or in the case of the younger children, words that have letter-sound correspondences that have not yet been taught. From Year 2 onwards, children will be tested on some of these words each week.

Speaking and Listening

Talk is fundamental to children’s learning and high-quality discussion provides the basis for children’s composition when they are writing. Across the curriculum, talk is valued and children are encouraged to listen attentively to the views and opinions of others. Developing good listening skills is vital as children need to be able to follow increasingly complex instructions in order to carry out tasks. They are helped to explain their thinking in a clear and precise way, express opinions, pose and answer questions.

Participation in problem solving, prediction and logical argument is encouraged in all subject areas. Oakfield’s aim is to help individuals to become articulate, confident speakers in a supportive and secure setting.

Writing

Throughout the school, we follow Pie Corbett’s Talk for Writing Approach to teach composition. It is an extremely powerful way to teach writing as it is based upon the principles of how children best learn. It enables children to imitate key language they need for a particular text type orally before reading and analysing it.

Before we begin a unit, we ask the children to “have a go” at writing a story or non-fiction text similar to the one we will be learning about. This allows their teachers to find out what to teach to help the children to progress well. We then use a range of engaging activities to help the children to internalise a model text as well as teaching them new writing skills. Next, we complete a shared write together to create our own text that has the structure and features of the model text we have learnt. Finally, the children complete a hot task where they show what they know by planning and writing their own texts independently.