All language skills are essential to allow us to communicate and engage with others. They allow us to expand socially, morally and culturally, and they allow us to lose ourselves in our imagination.

Reading – This is based on Little Wandle Phonics progression. When Phase 5 has been completed, children move on to Book Bands from Turquoise to Lime/Grey. Phased books are selected by adults but all children have a completely free choice of a Reading for Pleasure book to take home every week – from Year R to Year 2. The banks of books are selected by class teachers and include traditional story books, modern stories, information, and poetry amongst other genres.

Our ultimate aim is for all children to be able to read fluently and with comprehension, making predictions about books and links between books they have read. Reading should be joyful and expose the children to new worlds, both fictional and nonfictional.

Reading comprehension is supported through conversations, and sharing high quality, language rich texts and stories beyond the individual child’s reading ability. This encourages discussion around predictions and inference starting from the earliest days in school.

Words of the Week are used in every class to enrich vocabulary and aid comprehension skills. These words are linked to the current topic in any subject area, as needed by individual classes. They are often tier two or tier three vocabulary.

We see it as especially important that we share books from diverse social backgrounds and cultures and have large stocks of these books to share.

Reading is shared across every area of the curriculum, using books, websites, maps, classroom displays, song words, labels etc

We have a box of books for each year group with core read aloud texts to be shared informally with children. These have also been selected with the needs and ability of each year group in mind.

To encourage our journey as a ‘reading school’, we have a Staff WhatsApp group to share book recommendations.

Oracy

Children need to be taught to listen before almost anything else. This allows them to become more effective communicators. The weekly vocabulary sheets we send home are essential to help children listen to and understand new words, then use them in their own sentences. They help anxious children to be more aware of what words they are listening for and may be asked to use. This vocabulary encompasses all subject areas.

Correct sentence structure, questions, statements and higher order vocabulary are modelled consistently by all adults in school.