How do we teach reading at South Walney Junior School?

We teach reading explicitly through high quality texts in English (Core

Books) and through synthetic phonic books matched to our phoneme.  We use  pre-reading in other subjects  (academic reading).  We  practice reading daily, either  individually or in groups.  We read aloud a good quality book to our children every day.

We use the Big 5 ,the Simple View of Reading  and Herts for Learning pedagogy to teach our children to read:

1. Phonic Awareness– hearing the separate sounds in a word.
2. Phonics—knowing the graphemes (letters) and the sounds (phonemes) they represent e.g. s/p/ea/k (ea = long ‘e’ sound) We use Success For All synthetic phonics scheme accredited by the DFE and the same as the infant school
3. Fluency– using ghosting (reading together ),echoing (reading  a line to the child before they read it back) and  shared (reading a line or paragraph each).  We work on accuracy, speed (encouraging them to read faster but still with meaning), expression and prosody.  
4. Vocabulary– we teach vocabulary explicitly.  We look at the word in context in the text and try to work out the word meaning from this.   We do a vocabulary check at the beginning of most lessons, including the foundation subjects such as History and Geography which teaches academic vocabulary too.
5. Comprehension.  We teach a progressive system :VIPERS (Vocabulary, Inference,

Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Summary).  Year 3 and 4 work mostly on             retrieval, vocabulary and Inference.  Year 5 and 6 concentrate on the rest.

When practising our reading our adults will:

1. Point to the phonemes in the words and help the us to work out what sound they make. ‘That sound in  bread is a long ‘e’ phoneme.
2. Help us to split words—segment- using phonics e.g.  m/e/ss/y or with more complex words use syllables  per/form/ance (3 syllables) .  
3. Read with us, ghosting the text , echoing or sharing the reading.  Show us how to read with expression, pausing at the punctuation.  This called prosody.
4. Help us to read more quickly and not lose our place by showing us how to read from punctuation mark to punctuation mark .  Help us use our fingers or overlays.
5. Ask us what the words mean.  Encourage us to work out what the words mean in the context of the text.  If not, tell us what the words mean or use a dictionary.
6. Ask us questions about the text such as:  what does the character feel? (inference), help us to sum up what has happened so far (summary) or predict what comes next.