Reading and Writing

Reading Overview

Reading is of upmost priority at Ewanrigg Junior School. Everyday, children are immersed in a language and text rich curriculum and environment. We believe that the ability to read is key to accessing the wider curriculum and being armed with skills and tools to lead a successful life beyond education.

Throughout the day and through careful organisation, the children read at a level suitable to meet their individual needs as well as reading in larger groups leading to invaluable book talk.

We provide the following reading education for our children:

• Daily phonics sessions using an validated DFE systematic synthetic phonics programme.
• Daily fluency sessions to develop the skills of; speed, prosody, automatic, vocabulary understanding and accuracy.
• Daily sessions for children who can read at speed (more than 120WPM) and need to further develop understanding and comprehension skills.
• Daily English lessons using a range of quality texts as a stimulus for oracy and writing opportunities.
• Daily class books (adult read aloud)-this includes fiction, non fiction, poetry.
• Independent reading in our Reading Cabin. Children choose any book that they want to read. This develops a reading for pleasure.
• Paired reading.
• Reading with children at our feeder infant schools.
• Reading challenges and celebratory events

Early Reading - Systematic Synthetic Phonics

Phonics & Early Reading

At Ewanrigg Junior School we use ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds’ which is a DFE accredited, synthetic systematic phonics programme designed to help all children learn to read fluently and at speed so they can focus on developing their skills in comprehension, vocabulary and spelling. The ‘Rapid Catch Up’ programme is designed for Year 2 children and above. Children learn the 44 common sounds in the English language and how to blend them to read and spell.

At Ewanrigg Junior School, we firmly believe that reading is the key that unlocks the whole curriculum so the ability to efficiently decode is essential. Phonics sessions occur each day, as the consistency, continuity and pace of the programme is key to accelerating the progress of children’s reading development. Children are taught in small learning groups and regularly assessed. We have a small proportion of children on a Little Wandle SEND programme. This is structured to take longer in order to ensure the children have a good understanding and are taught at a pace suitable for the children’s individual needs.

Through Phonics teaching, we aim to teach all children to:

• apply the skill of blending phonemes in order to read words.
• segment words into their constituent phonemes in order to spell words.
• learn that blending and segmenting words are reversible processes.
• read high frequency words that do not conform to regular phonic patterns (tricky words).
• read texts closely matched to the programme and words that are within their phonic capabilities as early as possible.
• decode texts effortlessly so all their resources can be used to comprehend what they read.