In Nursery children receive daily sessions in the foundations for phonics, which focusses on all of the pre skills of reading.  This includes language development, story reading, phonological awareness and oral blending.

Initially, as children learn to read, they are given a picture book with no words with the intention that they will share the book and take part in a conversation generated by the pictures. They are also given a library book - this is a book for the adult to read and share with the child, to feed them with rich and wonderful vocabulary that hopefully one day they will use themselves!

Children will have regular reading practice through guided reading sessions with an adult three times a week focusing on the three key skills:

• decoding (being able to identify all of the words)
• Prosody-(reading with expression using understanding of the words to read with the correct emphasis)
• Comprehension- (understand what is happening in the story)

The same book is used for all of three sessions in the week, so children have the opportunity to apply all of these skills with the one text, giving them opportunities to practice. Books used for reading practice will be pitched within the secure phonic knowledge of each child meaning that these books must be fully decodable. Fully decodable means that the book only contains sounds children have been taught previously and are known securely. As a result, books used to practice reading should be easily read when they bring it home after working with it in school all week and will not contain words or sounds being learnt in the daily phonics sessions. Ebooks will be sent home at the end of each week and shared via Evidence Me.

Further reading opportunities in Reception includes:

• Book of the week - each weeks learning is based around a book, which is based around the half term topic
• Story time - this happens daily
• In addition to the decodable book, a reading book for pleasure is taken home from the classroom collection or the school library
• Daily phonic lessons
• Weekly reading opportunities and challenges are set within the Early Years environment
• Reading area in the classroom

Children in Year 1 continue to have regular reading practice sessions with an adult three times a week focusing on the three key skills:

• decoding (being able to identify all of the words)
• Prosody-(reading with expression using understanding of the words to read with the correct emphasis)
• Comprehension- (understand what is happening in the story)

Further reading opportunities each child receives in Year 1 include:

• Topic linked English book - each genre year 1 covers in English will be based around a high quality text that is linked to current topic.
• Daily phonic lessons
• Reading skills are taught in English lessons. Sometimes specific reading skills will be taught during the lesson in ability groups; other times it may be done through the initial teacher input before writing.
• Story time - this happens daily
• In addition to the decodable book, a reading book for pleasure is taken home from the classroom collection or the school library.
• Reading area in the classroom