Reading Scheme
Whole Class Reading
Reading is at the heart of classroom teaching at Jerounds. Our aim is for children to become confident and independent readers who have a love of reading for pleasure and gain pleasure and insight from reading. In order to build a love for reading, at the end of each day all children read a whole class text, they always have a physical copy to read along with the class teacher. These are varied, high quality texts used to engage children in reading, develop fluency and expose children to a range of genres from authors such as Roald Dahl, Julia Donaldson, Anne Fine, Michael Morpurgo and Dick King-Smith. Through shared reading, children are exposed to a breadth of high-quality vocabulary using age-appropriate texts. They are then able to further develop their understanding of these texts through Whole Class Guided Reading the next academic year.
Whole Class Guided Reading
In addition to daily Phonics sessions, children in KS1 are also heard reading over the week in small groups. Children are generally set by ability, with a carousel of activities which may include a Phonics activity (such as sorting ‘tricky’ words), basic comprehension activities (such as posing their own questions in response to an engaging picture and short caption) and quiet reading on their own. Setting by ability allows the teacher to focus on children’s particular gaps in their knowledge and decoding skills, to best support their progress and prepare them for later Whole Class Reading. Questions in these sessions often follow the Reciprocal Reading system, which includes both literal and basic inference questions, as well as introducing children to the skills of summarising what they read and predicting what may happen next.
Once children are ready in Year 2, Whole Class Reading sessions are introduced, and continue across KS2. These take place daily with children reading the same text – usually, but not exclusively, linked to a current topic the class is studying. Each 25-30 minutes session is carefully planned, so that children have experience of analysing a range of texts - short stories, poems, fiction and non-fiction. Sessions start with a short fluency activity, involving everyone reading aloud together, to encourage expression, which in turn aids comprehension. Whole Class Guided Reading sessions focus on the teaching of new vocabulary, followed by a reading objective taken from the year group’s objectives in the National Curriculum, to ensure thorough coverage of these vital skills. Objectives taught include use of language, text organisation and structure, information retrieval, inference based on characters’ words and actions, summaries and predictions. Sessions are competed with a plenary, when children share their reading activity responses and justifications for their opinions. Children’s responses are recorded in their Reading Journals.
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