READING

At Bury and Whitefield Jewish Primary School, we not only teach children how to read; we also aim to nurture a love of reading. Our range of class texts ensures that every child is exposed to good quality literature as they move through school. These books have been chosen as core texts that will inspire and engage our children and help drive our English Curriculum. The teaching of reading is also embedded in the wider curriculum, giving children plenty of opportunities to transfer and apply their reading skills in other subjects.

Our school uses a variety of books from a wide range of scheme and non-scheme publications. Throughout the school, books are banded and teachers choose specific books for children to take home and read based on their age and ability. Once children’s reading ability is refined (they can confidently read beyond the book band their age suggests they should be at), children are allowed to choose books themselves, from the classroom or library.

Throughout our curriculum and reading for pleasure slots, we encourage high quality conversation of texts. We not only encourage reading of novels but also of non-fiction texts, magazines, graphic novels etc… to ensure all children are catered for and inspired. To help with this, we also have regular reading for pleasure newsletters.

Our goal is that children leaving Key Stage 2 can read fluently, understand extended prose and read for pleasure. Reading is singled out as of extreme importance since, through it, ‘Reading allows pupils to acquire knowledge and to build on what they already know.’ Children are taught how to decode words through high quality phonics teaching, as well as how to understand texts through regular whole class reading sessions. Reading for pleasure is important to BWJPS and is specifically timetabled. These slots vary between the teacher reading a class text to the children, children reading their chosen books and children conversing about said books.

At BWJPS, we follow Rising Stars Rocket Phonics program. Rocket phonics is a systematic, synthetic phonics program.

Children in Nursery develop their phonological awareness during this phase. Children will explore environmental sounds, become familiar with rhythm, rhyme and alliteration. As children become more confident in discriminating between different sounds, they will begin to be introduced to letter sounds and use them to orally blend and segment the sounds in words.

In Reception, children begin to learn the letters, digraphs and trigraphs for each of the forty-four sounds in the English language. Children learn how to blend and segment these sounds in order to use them to read and write.

In Year One and Two, children learn alternative spellings and pronunciations for previously taught phonemes. They also develop their blending and segmenting skills to read and write longer words with more than one syllable.

For more information on Rocket Phonics, please look at the parent guide: Rocket Phonics Parent Guide

Mrs Whittam’s Phonics Powerpoint