Reading at Finchingfield

Learning to read from a young age provides numerous benefits that can have long-lasting effects on a child's development. These benefits span cognitive, social, and emotional domains and set a strong foundation for future learning and success. 

Our approach is underpinned by the following five pillars of reading helping our learners achieve reading success through high quality instruction:

• phonemic awareness

• phonics

• fluency

• vocabulary

• comprehension

Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify units of sound (phonemes) within words and use this to segment and orally blend words. This relies on strong auditory discrimination that enables children to distinguish between similar sounding words like "cat" and "hat" or the subtle differences the letter 'm' and 'n' make. 

Children are initially taught to identify and segment the initial, final and middle sound of simple three letter words such as man, pin and pan and how to orally blend them back. This process begins in our nursery setting.

Playing with sounds, words, listening to rhymes, songs and stories sharpens children's auditory discrimination skills and fine-tunes their ears in readiness for our phonics program.  

The ability to recognise and differentiate between the different letter shapes is also is a crucial skill in the journey towards reading. Our early reading curriculum is also designed to enhance visual discrimination skills in a playful and interactive manner so that children notice the difference between the different abstract letter shapes

Children engage in exercises that involve matching shapes, identifying patterns, and sorting objects for example based on their visual characteristics as well as activities that develop left to right eye tracking that is essential for reading across a page. You will see a range of activities in both our Nursery and Reception classroom that are specifically designed to train children's visual acuity.

Integrating both auditory and visual discrimination activities into our approach, creates a holistic approach to essential pre-reading skills.

Once children have acquired strong phonemic awareness, children are introduced to phonics where sounds are represented symbolically by letters.  Using phonetic knowledge is the mechanics of decoding words by identifying the sounds each letter or combinations of letters make.

We use a systematic synthetic phonics approach which is a highly effective method that forms the building blocks for strong literacy skills.

Systematic Synthetic Phonics is a method of teaching reading and writing that focuses on ta logical sequential instruction of phonemes (the smallest units of sound in a language) and their corresponding graphemes (the letters or groups of letters that represent these sounds). The approach and resources we use is from the Twinkl phonics program. 

Phonetic knowledge is reinforced by using tools like the sandpaper letters, the moveable alphabet or building simple words in our nursery setting with alphabet pebbles.

Developing reading  fluency through frequent and consistent practice is essential. It is the ability to rapidly read words accurately and is essential if children are to comprehend or understand what they are reading. This starts with oral fluency with children joining in with familiar rhymes and learning to retell well known stories using actions and visual story maps. 

Children in our Reception Class take part in a daily phonics lesson that recap on prior learning, introduce a new letter/sound combination, and give children the opportunity to apply their learning in a reading and a writing or spelling context. Children are expected to quickly identify the sound certain letter combinations make, decode and encode words quickly and apply this to reading sentences, often reading aloud in unison with the whole class.

Children also need to have a broad and rich vocabulary to comprehend what they are reading. 

Vocabulary and comprehension development is introduced with our nursery children and extends right up to our Year 6 children.  Our youngest learners are exposed to a broad range of topics, themes objects of interest to stimulate talk, exploratory and imaginary play, daily story time, access to pictures and picture books to develop inference and deduction and the explicit teaching of new words.

Older learners are exposed to carefully selected high quality texts for reading lessons and story time as well as specific teaching through a process called Close Reading. 

Close reading is a careful and detailed analysis of a text, focusing on significant details and patterns to understand the deeper meaning and structure. This method involves several three sequential key steps that immerse children deeper and deeper into a text during the course of a lesson.

Unlike traditional shelving, forward-facing books showcase their covers, beckoning readers with vibrant images and intriguing titles. This layout sparks curiosity and encourages our young learners to explore genres they might not have considered before. Curiosity for the printed word begins in our nursery by selecting carefully curated selection of picture books and information texts. 

Our collection books is designed to make the journey into the world of literature an enticing adventure.  Our dedicated readers are always on hand to offer personalised recommendations, fostering a lifelong love for the written word.

We also encourage parents to actively engage with their children as they explore the world of reading. By reading together, parents can provide support, celebrate achievements, and foster a love for reading that extends beyond the classroom.

As children’s confidence grows and they become increasingly fluent, children are welcome to choose books from our extensive class and school library where the joy of reading comes to life. 

Our selection of decodable phonetic reading books are specially crafted to align with the phonics principles taught in the early stages of reading instruction. These books are meticulously designed to feature words that can be sounded out using the phonetic rules and letter-sound relationships that children are learning. 

Children take home books carefully selected to ensure they have been taught the sounds and any common exception words in school so that they achieve a high level of success and are not set up to fail.

We recognise that reading is not merely about decoding words; it is a dynamic process that involves comprehension, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. 

As children master decoding, they can devote more cognitive resources to understanding the meaning of the text. This paves the way for improved comprehension skills.

Lessons focus on developing  children's ability to delve into the layers of a text, extracting meaning beyond the surface. Children learn to identify literary devices, analyse character development, and discern themes and motifs. 

From classic literature to contemporary gems, we strive to provide a wide range of choices that cater to various interests and confidence levels making the journey into the world of literature an enticing adventure. 

When our children become fluent readers, they move away from choosing books from a selection of levelled books. Instead, we teach our older more experienced readers to select books that they feel they can enjoy and read successfully within a framework . Where children need guidance, we offer this support using a range of assessment tools and our professional judgement. 

We believe this approach supports our reading for pleasure and information agenda and avoids conveying that reading is solely to move onto the next level.