Reading at St. Gregory's

Reading at St. Gregory's

Reading is one of the single most important factors in determining a child’s future success. At St. Gregory's, we teach and embed reading across our whole curriculum. We have a widely-stocked library that children regularly visit, and – with the help of our pupil library monitors – use to borrow and return books of their choice. In addition to this, we participate in reading-related events such as World Book Day, book sales and book swaps. These events not only promote reading in generally but also give children the opportunity to discuss books they enjoy, complete book reviews, visualise their favourite characters, hear from real-life authors as well as work collaboratively to support their peers across the school. Teachers read regularly to their pupils, sharing a range of books through their class libraries and our end of day ‘reading@3’ initiative. Our aim is to develop and inspire a love of reading that will last a lifetime.

Foundation stage and Key Stage 1

We teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Nursery and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through the school. 

Children are given regular opportunities to apply the phonics they have learned to reading fully decodable books. The phonic progression in these books match the progression of Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. Children practise independent reading with fully decodable books that are closely matched to their secure phonics knowledge. 

Children undertake three reading practice sessions. The sessions are designed to focus on three key reading skills: decoding, prosody and comprehension. 

At the end of Year One the children will take the statutory National Phonic Screening Check. If children are still working towards passing the Screening Check by the end of Year One then they will access interventions to enable them to retake the test in Year Two.

Key Stage Two

In Key Stage Two, children who are not able to successfully blend and segment for reading and writing will receive structured Phonics interventions in order to ensure they are able to access the Key Stage Two National Curriculum. All pupils in Key Stage Two are taught reading through whole-class guided reading sessions, which teach specific reading comprehension skills such as inference and retrieval. To help children remember and apply these skills, we use the VIPERS acronym, where each letter stands for each skill (please see additional resources at the bottom of this page). During the guided reading sessions, children are exposed to a wide range of texts, often linked to other areas of the curriculum. Pupils take inspiration from the texts, books and authors they encounter throughout our literature-rich English curriculum and strong links are made between the areas of reading and writing across they key stage.