Reading
At Stoke St Gregory School, we love to read. We have many ways of developing skills and encouraging reading enjoyment for our pupils.
Beginning with the skills needed for decoding, our youngest children work develop early reading skills through their phonic learning. At Stoke St Gregory we use the DfE accredited programme Unlocking Letters and Sounds. Our early readers engage with fully decodable reading books before they are then able to take their next steps in their own reading journey.
Click here to find out more information about Unlocking Letters and Sounds
We teach reading in school in a variety of ways. Each class has whole class reading lessons and daily storytime. In these sessions, the class explore a variety of high quality texts. Vocabulary is extended and information found as the texts are explored. There will sometimes be a focus on prediction, inference or the skills linked to understanding characters. The reading material will at times be linked to learning across the wider curriculum. Pupils enjoy exploring the texts as a class and engage enthusiastically in these sessions.
Our pupils also have individual reading books from our reading scheme. These books are shared between home and school. Until the children get to Copper level, they read each book three times. The first read is to decode, the second is to develop fluency and the third read has a focus on comprehension. We advise that a full read of the book is completed in each reading session and as a general pattern we would expect the child to have the same book for three days. Once the pupils move on from Copper level, they then read each text twice (for fluency and comprehension). Reading is assessed by the class teachers to ensure all pupils are on the appropriate levels for them to ensure they are challenged and engaged. Having completed our reading scheme, pupils access free readers from our library that is stocked with high quality texts. Teachers support book choice to ensure the books are of the appropriate challenge level and are a mixture of authors and styles.
As a school, we are advocates of reading for pleasure and strive to ensure all of our pupils have the skills they need to broaden their experiences of reading both now and for their future lives.
We are further developing our reading areas within school. As you can see, the Raven pupils pictured above approve of the changes made so far! (Sept 2022)
Interesting Reading Statistics
Did you know?
By the time they are 5 years old, children who are never read to are exposed to 4,662 words. Those who are read to 1–2 times per week are exposed to 63,570 words. Those who are read to 3–5 times per week are exposed to169,520 words. For those who are read to daily, it's 296,660 words. For any who hear five books a day, it's an incredible 1,483,300 words.
The impact of being exposed to new vocabulary through varied and high quality reading experiences cannot be over-estimated.
This evening, do you have time to share a book or two with your child?
Decoding, Fluency and Comprehension
See the documents below to find out more about how to support your child with reading at home. Younger children in school read books 3 times. In the first reading, there is a focus on decoding and learning unfamiliar words. In the second reading, the focus is fluency. In the third reading it is about the comprehension of the text.
Do you want recommendations for reading material for your child?
Check out these websites for advice on some great books for different age groups.
https://www.thereaderteacher.com/
https://ourfp.org/supporting-rah/
https://www.booksfortopics.com/
https://www.lovereading4kids.co.uk/
https://www.booktrust.org.uk/books-and-reading/our-recommendations/
