Reading at Felsted Primary
At Felsted Primary School, we take a two-fold approach to reading: the skill of reading beginning with a synthetic phonics scheme alongside promoting a love of books.
Early Reading:
Phonics is taught using The Monster Phonics scheme. In this scheme, the children are taught the individual phonemes and then learn to blend these sounds together to read words in an engaging and visual format.
The children in Reception and Key stage 1 also follow the Monster Phonics reading scheme, with each book focusing on particular phonemes linked to the phonics being taught in class. The children also receive sharing books – non-decodable story books - to take home to share with parents and carers and encourage a love of books.
High Frequency Words are used to enhance our reading scheme and these are taught in line with the National Curriculum. From September 2023, the order that HFWs are taught and the children are exposed to, will be in line with the Monster Phonics scheme.
Reading:
Once children are in Key Stage 2, children are encouraged to move on to ‘free reading’ books where they are able to take the skills learnt in Key Stage 1 and independently apply them. Children are encouraged by classroom adults to choose appropriate free reading books, dependent on their current ability.
For those children who still require decodable books due to additional needs or for confidence building, we also have a selection of decodable, high quality books that are more appealing to older children as well as a selection of Dyslexia friendly chapter books.
Reading Champions:
Reading at Felsted Primary is also promoted successfully through our Reading Champion incentive as explained below:
Reading Champions is Felsted Primary’s award-winning initiative for raising the profile of and encouraging reading among the pupils.
Every week, two pupils from each class are chosen as the ‘Reading Champions’ based on the effort they have put into reading at home and school that week.
The Reading Champions get a certificate and are allowed to choose one of 5 superhero bookmarks and a certificate. If the pupils collect 5 bookmarks, they can claim a free book.
Every time a child gains 5 bookmarks they are ‘promoted’ on the scheme and awarded a badge corresponding to their rank. Children can progress to ‘Sergeant Reader’, ‘Captain Reader’ and finally to ‘Major Reader’. Once they had achieved the accolade of ‘Major Reader’, the children are invited to submit a new superhero onto the scheme. Hence, we also have new reading superheroes such as ‘Miss Terry’ and ‘Maggie Zeen’.
Guided Reading:
Guided reading is taught using different approaches, dependent on year group.
Reception children use the Monster Phonics books as group reading books at the start of the week and focus on reading skills and comprehension.
Year 1 children use Fred’s Teaching scheme to further support their reading skills and focus on VIPERS style questions in a whole class situation.
Children in Years 2-5 also follow Fred’s Teaching scheme which focuses on high quality texts and exposure to VIPERS style questions in a whole class format.
Year 6 use the Teaching Booth, whole class teaching approach focusing on comprehension and VIPERS questions to support readiness for SATS.
Reading Environment:
Every classroom has an engaging reading corner, with a variety of different high quality text types available to the children. We have tried to ensure that we have a selection of books available that would appeal to ALL children which are exchanged with the library service on a regular basis.
Community Readers:
We are very fortunate that we have a number of parents/grandparents and members of the community who volunteer their time to come and read with the children.
Each class is assigned a designated community reader who reads weekly with targeted children based on Teacher assessment.