So Matilda's strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices by all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea.
Roald Dahl, Matilda
Daily Reading:
From Phonics to Fluent, Thoughtful Readers
Once children have secured the phonics knowledge they need to read accurately, they move into our whole-class reading approach. From this point through to Year 6, children take part in a daily reading lesson.
Aims:
Our aim is to develop children who can read accurately, fluently and with understanding, while also building the stamina, vocabulary and knowledge they need to engage successfully with increasingly complex texts.
Across a typical five-lesson sequence, children experience three complementary approaches:
Fluency:
Fluent reading provides the bridge between decoding words and understanding what we read.
During fluency lessons, children work predominantly with the class novel. Important vocabulary is explicitly pre-taught so that children can concentrate on reading the text accurately and expressively.
Teachers explicitly model fluent reading and children are given repeated opportunities to rehearse sections of text. We develop:
- accuracy and automatic word recognition;
- appropriate pace and phrasing;
- prosody, including expression, stress and rhythm;
- intonation and attention to punctuation;
- confidence when reading increasingly challenging texts aloud.
Our approach is informed by the work of Christopher Such, with fluency taught explicitly and deliberately rather than simply asking children to "read with expression".
Extended Reading:
Extended reading gives children the opportunity to read longer, uninterrupted sections of the same text.
The focus shifts from practising a short passage to sustaining successful reading over a greater length of time. This allows children to build the stamina and concentration they need to become confident, independent readers.
Children are also given opportunities to discuss what they have read, make connections and clarify their understanding. We aim for approximately 70% of the lesson to be spent reading and 30% discussing the text, ensuring that children spend substantial amounts of valuable lesson time actually reading.
Close Reading:
Close reading teaches children to slow down and look closely at a carefully selected section of text. Teachers guide children to notice important vocabulary, language choices, meaning and evidence within the text.
Through careful questioning and discussion, children learn to:
- retrieve and locate relevant information;
- explore vocabulary in context;
- make and justify inferences;
- consider an author's choices;
- make connections within and across texts;
- explain their thinking using evidence from what they have read.
Close reading enables children to move beyond simply understanding what happens to thinking carefully about how meaning is created and how they know.
“A book can’t change the world on its own. But a book can change readers. And readers? They can change the world.”
John Green