The reading curriculum at William Booth Primary aims to not only develop children as confident readers, but to instil a lifelong love of reading that impacts on all other areas of learning and improves their overall life chances.  It is seen as a fundamental aspect of all areas of our curriculum and is used to drive learning in other subjects.  The reading curriculum aims to teach children about the world around them including learning about people, places and events outside their own experience. Our reading sessions also play a significant part in helping to close the vocabulary gap. This leads to more highly-developed language skills and improves a child’s ability to write well. Reading for pleasure is an important part of our daily timetable and is a time when children can choose their own reading material and engage in high quality book talk with their teachers and peers and become really excited about reading.  Our weekly reading assembly is designed to further develop these skills, introducing children to texts and authors – opening their eyes to a host of reading material. Children in the Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1 have daily phonics lessons to develop their reading skills and build their fluency.  We follow the Revised Letters and Sounds scheme.  Children in Key Stage 2 study novels with their class to further develop their skills of comprehension as well as engage them in a love of books.

PHONICS OVERVIEW

We follow Soundswrite.

• Sounds-Write is a quality first phonics programme. Its purpose is to provide classroom professionals with a comprehensive system with which to teach reading, spelling and writing. It is introduced in YR, taught in KS1 and fine-tuned throughout the rest of Key Stage 2. It serves very successfully as an intervention or catch-up programme.
• Sounds-Write is acknowledged by the DfE as meeting ALL its criteria for an effective phonics teaching programme.
• It teaches all key elements of conceptual understanding, factual knowledge, and the three essential skills of blending, segmenting and phoneme manipulation necessary for learning to read and spell and it does so on a daily basis until all children achieve the automaticity that underlies the fluency of every successful reader.
• The alphabetic principle is taught successfully by engaging young learners in vigorous, interactive and enjoyable phonics activities that are also situated within a language-rich curriculum.

From Reception to Year 6, students learn the concepts necessary for proficient reading and writing. They master the 175 most common spellings of the 44 sounds in English through reading and writing polysyllabic words, as well as following our two codes:

• the Initial Code (Reception)
• the Extended Code (Year 1 onwards).