Bowsland Green Primary School
Bowsland Green Primary School
Bowsland Green Primary School
Trees

At Bowsland Green Primary School, we work hard to develop a reading culture throughout the school by creating welcoming book areas in classrooms, a school library that hosts a variety of reading genres, and by raising the profile of reading through a print-rich environment, attractive book displays and promoting the written word at all times.

Ongoing research continues to support our belief that reading for pleasure, as a self-selected pastime, has a profound and positive effect on the attitudes and attainment of learners. Social reading environments, where pupils read together and discuss texts and their responses to them, and reading aloud, where a whole group can be immersed in a text, are two elements of our work to promote this reading culture. Both book talk at home, and adults modelling positive reading habits, help to reinforce the importance of and enjoyment of reading for pleasure.

High priority is given to reading instruction throughout the school. Children are taught with their class and year group peers to read a wide range of books and other texts. Adults model aloud the thought processes they follow while decoding a text, re-reading and experimenting with possibilities in order to make the text make sense. Pupils then use those skills with similar or related texts, with the same questions and sentence stems being applied and practised in widening contexts. This method of guided reading ensures children are taught a range of reading skills and attitudes which they then practise at school and home.

Children are also given targets linked to key skills for reading. These targets are shared with the children to enable them to apply when reading independently. Children are able to take home reading and library books to read with their parent/carer at least three times a week. Parents then comment in their child’s home-school reading diary on how their child reads.

Questions to ask while reading with your child:

KS1 reading vipers

KS2 reading vipers

EYFS and Year 1

At Bowsland Green, we use the Read, Write, Inc. phonics programme to teach systematic synthetic phonics. RWInc phonics is a powerful teaching tool which ensures that young children will be well-placed to read and spell words with fluency and confidence by the time they reach the end of KS1. It is taught each day in a fun way but also with rigour and pace.

Teaching begins informally in term one of the Foundation Stage and more formally in term two, after the children are assessed and grouped according to their reading ability.

Children are then taught in small ability groups that are appropriate to their stage of reading. They are reassessed every six weeks and moved according to the progress they have made. Children who exit the programme with good reading development move onto the national literacy strategy. We aim to have the majority of children out of Read Write Inc by the end of year 1.

Find out more – Our New Reading Scheme