At Bowling Park, we know that good English skills are essential to our children’s future success, both during their time at school and as adults. At the heart of our curriculum is the belief that all children have an entitlement to be taught the skills to communicate effectively through reading, writing and speaking.

We develop reading skills by following a 3-stage approach: Early Reading, Developing Reading and Expert Reading. This approach allows children to quickly and systematically learn the phonemic code and develop reading fluency so that they can read widely across the curriculum, developing their vocabulary and comprehension.

Early Reading  

Early reading is taught through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Nursery 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 ensure that nursery children are well-prepared to begin learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and blending in Reception. In Reception and Y1, we teach 30-minute daily phonics lessons, building from 10-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to the full-length lesson as quickly as possible.

We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised expectations of progress:

• Children in Reception are taught to read and spell words using Phase 2 and 3 GPCs, and words with adjacent consonants (Phase 4) with fluency and accuracy.
• Children in Year 1 review Phase 3 and 4 (phase 2 where necessary) and are taught to read and spell words using Phase 5 GPCs with fluency and accuracy.

Any child who needs additional practice has daily Keep-up support, taught by a fully trained adult. Daily phonics lessons are provided for any child in Year 2 who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the Phonics screening check. If any child in Year 3 to 6 has gaps in their phonic knowledge when reading or writing, we plan phonics ‘catch-up’ lessons to address specific reading/writing gaps. These short, sharp lessons last 20 minutes and take place five times a week.

In Reception, Y1 and Y2, we teach children to read through reading practice sessions three times a week. Sessions use books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge. The reading practice sessions focus on three key reading skills: decoding, prosody and comprehension. In Reception, these sessions start in Week 4. Children who are not yet decoding have daily additional blending practice in small groups, so that they quickly learn to blend and can begin to read books. In KS2, we continue to teach reading in this way for any children who still need to practise reading with decodable books.

Developing Reading  

Once children have secure phonic knowledge, it is imperative that they become fluent readers; reading fluency is the pre-requisite for comprehension. In Y2 and Y3, we use Little Wandle’s reading fluency programme which consists of 10 levels ranging from 60wpm at level 1 and 120wpm at level 10.

When children can fluently read and spell words using the phonemic code from the Little Wandle programme, their reading instruction will continue with reading lessons which are taught 4 times a week. These reading lessons ensure that children receive a balanced reading diet with opportunities for close reading, extended reading and fluency practice. Fluency practice decreases in frequency over the course of KS2 as children develop and expand their orthographic store.

During reading lessons, children develop the four essential strategies and skills for reading comprehension:

• Developing positive attitudes to reading
• Understanding the vocabulary used in texts
• Skills and strategies to read for understanding
• Expressing, recording and presenting understanding

This enables children to achieve the following outcomes:

• Understanding the whole text
• Retrieving information from texts
• Inferential understanding
• Reading to find out and to learn

Expert Reading  

Becoming an expert reader involves a multi-faceted process that encompasses various skills and strategies. As children progress, their orthographic store grows and they are able to read with automaticity. Through exposure to a wide variety of genres and text types they transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Reading to learn involves using reading as a tool for acquiring knowledge and information across different subject areas. Encouraging children to read widely and deeply in various disciplines helps them develop a broad understanding of the world and fosters a love for lifelong learning.

• Whole Class (Shared) Reading - Children listen to an adult read a book every day. These books are carefully chosen to ensure that children experience diverse, high-quality literature.
• School Library - Children have termly visits to our school library.
• Belonging to Books - Our class libraries include books from diverse authors. Characters and themes in these books represent people from a range of backgrounds so that children see themselves reflected in the pages of their favourite books whilst also learning to understand and respect the lives of others.
• Reading Club - This supports a 'community of readers' in the classroom by providing opportunities to discuss and recommend books to each other.
• Story Project - A programme which uses books to improve the mental health and well-being of children.
• Festival of Stories - An annual community celebration of books and stories with workshops and activities which promote a love of reading.
• Rewarding Reading