‘It is essential that, by the end of their primary education, all pupils are able to read fluently, and with confidence, in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education.’ English National Curriculum (DfE, 2013)

From year 1 to Year 6, we follow the National Curriculum when delivering our reading lessons. The National curriculum splits reading into 2 categories:

Word reading and Comprehension (both listening and reading).

Word Reading

At All Saints Church of England Primary School, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. We continue to teach phonics through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised in Year 1, which continues to build on the phonetical knowledge they learnt in Reception. This ensures children develop their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.

As our pupils become more confident in their decoding, we focus on developing our pupils into more fluent readers, allowing them to read with greater prosody and expression. The books chosen are matched to the children’s phonetic knowledge and awareness and comes from the Little Wandle Big Cats phonics sets.

Comprehension

From Year 1 onwards, greater emphasis is placed on being able to not only verbally comprehend a text but also comprehend by writing responses. Through the Little Wandle reading scheme, children are provided with an opportunity to answer comprehension questions linked to the text they are reading. Our children will have a variety of opportunities to learn the different reading skills required to fully understand a text in order to become a more fluent reader. This will be taught not only in their Little Wandle reading sessions but through whole class reading and as part of their writing journey in literacy, where they are introduced to a class text as a stimulus for writing.

Implementation

Whole Class Reading Comprehension

Whole class teaching of reading comprehension is covered within the English Unit (5 Phase English Plan – Phase 1 Prediction and Phase 2 Comprehension) to allow children to apply the skills taught in reading comprehension to the class text. Teachers will recap the skills taught and children will have the opportunity to answer a set of questions on a range of strands and question types covered so far.​ Each Literacy Unit will have a different class text to follow. 

In Ks1, we feel it is important to teach children the different comprehension strands that they will encounter in our continuum approach. We teach children these skills using the VIPERS. Each viper is associated with a dog character.

The teachers will create a comprehension sheet using the question stems below, which is a tool a child at All Saints will recognise throughout their time.

As well as the question stems, teachers in Key Stage 1 are also provided with question types they can include in their comprehension.

In Year 1, any written reading comprehension completed will be in their yellow literacy book.

In Year 2, any written reading comprehension completed that is part of phase 1 and 2 of the 5 phase literacy plan is completed in their yellow literacy book. Any additional reading based on the whole class text or any other texts is to be completed in their green reading books.