The Teaching of Reading

At Oxhey, reading is an integral part of our curriculum and children are immersed into it throughout the day. It is taught specifically during phonics and English lessons, but children are practising and applying their reading skills constantly across all subject too.

There are many different methods of teaching and practising reading such as:

• Shared reading (ERICA)
• Group Guided reading
• Spelling/Phonic lessons
• Storytelling
• Individual reading
• Story Time
• Read at Home/Take home books

Reading Schemes

We ensure that our reading schemes encourage children to apply the new phonological knowledge they have gained by providing them with decodable home reader reading books from schemes such as Big Cat Collins Phonics, Oxford University Press and  Project X . Alongside these schemes we use Rigby Star and Oxford Reading Tree and a wide range of appropriately levelled real books to ensure children develop a great love of reading and have an opportunity to embed the application of key reading skills.

As children become confident readers, they read books that closely matched to their reading ability. Children are encouraged to read books more than once to focus on different aspects of reading such as building fluency, reading aloud with confidence and verbal comprehension skills.

1st time - to decode and read unfamiliar words or new words

2nd time - to build fluency (read it at a quicker pace and self-correcting as required)

3rd time - for comprehension (the understanding of the story, they should be more fluent, therefore be able to answer questions about the text including inference, when the words do not tell you everything!)