Reading at Five Lanes Primary School

At Five Lanes Primary School, we strongly believe that reading is a key life-skill that underpins learning. Reading develops and broadens children’s language skills and vocabulary, and is key to achieving success across the curriculum. Here at Five Lanes, we encourage children to develop a love of reading and we provide varied opportunities for children to enjoy reading for pleasure as well as for learning. Enabling our children to become fluent and confident readers is very important to us and whilst children are here at Five Lanes, we ensure that they have opportunities to experience reading a wide variety of text types from a wide range of authors.

Foundation Stage

In Foundation stage (Nursery and Reception), we make books available for children to read during carpet and snack times and also encourage children to take home books from their class libraries. Children read daily during focused small group and one to one reading sessions and we use Songbirds and the Jelly and Bean phonics books which children also take home. We hold regular Rainbow Relative Reading sessions and phonics workshops so that parents and carers can come into school to read and take part in phonics activities alongside their children.

Key Stage 1

In Key stage 1 (Years 1 and 2), children also take part in daily guided reading sessions with their class teachers and class teaching assistants. In these sessions, children build up their decoding skills, reading fluency and comprehension. Individual reading books from the Collins Big Cat, Oxford Reading Tree, Treetops and Songbirds reading schemes also go home for children to read with their parents and carers. Children can access books from their class libraries and from the Leeds Library Service’s blue topic boxes.

Key stage 2

Throughout years 3, 4, 5 and 6, children participate in regular guided group and whole class reading sessions with their class teachers and/or class teaching assistants. During guided reading sessions, children access the Leeds Library Service’s topic boxes, class reading boxes and also texts from our Key Stage 2 guided reading resources which include Treetops, Navigator and Rigby schemes. These reading sessions make use of reciprocal reading strategies and encourage children to develop their comprehension and decoding skills through the use of the four reciprocal reading strands:

• Predict
• Clarify
• Question
• Summarise

We use reciprocal reading strategies to encourage children to think about their own thought processes when reading and to help children become more actively involved in comprehension as they read. It teaches children to think of and ask questions during their reading which helps make the text more comprehensible.

Children also participate in Accelerated Reader from Year 3. Through the AR scheme, children complete a Star Reader test each term and a points target is set. This short online reading comprehension quiz assigns children to a specific range of books. The books in their range will be challenging but not too hard to read: this concept is known as a zone of proximal development (ZPD). AR allows children to self-monitor their individual reading. Children choose their own books within their ZPD, complete a short multiple-choice quiz after reading the book to check understanding and then earn points towards their individual target.

In addition to guided group and whole class reading, children also have class story time. Teachers may choose a class story linked to a topic that their class are currently working on or may choose one suggested by the children or in response to a specific event eg Year 5 reading Room 13 as their class story before/after their Whitby residential.