At Winlaton West Lane, we believe that reading is the magic key; it takes you where you want to be!

Reading plays a vital role in the development and education of your child.  Here at West Lane, we ensure that pupils have lots of opportunities to read in lots of different contexts. We continually strive to promote a love of reading to ensure that pupils are ready for the next stages in their learning. Read on below to discover more about the teaching of reading at our school.

If you would like to find out more about reading at West Lane, please contact your child’s class teacher or our English Lead, Mrs Bell. You may also find some of the downloadable documents below to be useful.

• Little Wandle R and Yr1 overview
• Progression in Reading
• Glossary of Phonics Terms
• Strategies for Supporting Reading
• Encouraging Reluctant Readers

Useful Websites

• Gateshead Libraries
• Love Reading 4 Kids
• Newcastle Libraries
• Phonics Play
• Seven Stories
• Winlaton Library

Intent

At Winlaton West Lane Community Primary School, we are passionate and determined that every pupil will learn to read, regardless of their background, needs or abilities. Our reading curriculum is planned specifically around the needs and interests of our children and underpins every area of our wider bespoke, vocabulary-rich curriculum that engages interest, ignites curiosity and prepares our children to be a successful workforce of the future.

Our curriculum motivates and incites children to develop a range of skills: questioning, knowledge acquisition, research, debate, reasoning, problem solving, coping with challenge and critical thinking among others. We recognise that reading – from a range of engaging and informative sources – plays a huge part in the development of all of these skills and endeavour to place reading at the very heart of all we do here at West Lane.

Implementation

A love of books and reading pervades our school; books are widely available in classrooms, corridors and are encouraged during children’s free time in order to develop a lifelong love of reading from a young age. Pupils enjoy regular reading lessons, as well as a daily time to listen to a class novel and for independent reading for pleasure, and children are immersed in a range of stories, poems, rhymes and non-fiction. As well as being carefully selected by class teachers to develop pupils’ reading skills such as vocabulary and language comprehension, chosen class texts are also used to inspire the lifelong love of reading. We know that our children learn best when knowledge is linked, so they are always offered and exposed to a range of fiction and non-fiction that complements their learning across the curriculum (for example, in history, geography, science and art) as well as challenging and engaging age-appropriate books on a range of topics and themes appropriate to their age and interest level.

Early readers follow the Little Wandle Phonics Programme, starting with Phase 1 in Nursery and the direct instruction of systematic. Synthetic phonics from Phase 2 upwards is discretely taught from the beginning of Reception.

We know that reading is a vital skill to help children grasp the future with excitement and confidence, and developing early fluency and expression through the rigorous teaching of phonics and early reading allows our children to quickly develop into confident and capable readers, making rapid and clear progress. This is supplemented by our Early Reading Scheme which is closely matched to the sounds that children already know to allow for consolidation and practice of new GPCs at home and in school.

From Reception, children are given one or two books each week, which are closely matched to their phonic level. Our main reading scheme in school is Oxford Project X. In addition to this, pupils in Early Years also enjoy books from the Oxford Reading Tree, Pearson Phonics Bug and Dandelion schemes, again linked to their phonic level. In Key Stage 1, alongside Project X, some children continue to read books from the Dandelion scheme to further develop their skills.

Across our entire curriculum, we embrace computing and the use of apps to compliment the teaching of reading and development of reading skills in school (for example, the use of Accelerated Reader, Seesaw, Now Press Play etc). We understand that active learning plays a key role in the development of skills across the curriculum and endeavour to weave this into our teaching of reading wherever possible.

Impact

Children at Winlaton West Lane Community Primary School love reading: they love talking about books; they love discovering new characters and worlds; and they love finding out new information. Reading underpins whole-school events such as Remembrance Week, Science Week and Transition, and World Book Day celebrations are always a highlight of the year. Through their participation in our engaging, bespoke and vocabulary-rich reading curriculum, West Lane children are becoming a generation of confident, capable and enthusiastic readers.

In our school, we believe that “Reading is the magic key; it takes you where you want to be.” The outcomes of our reading curriculum reflect this: ensuring children are well-prepared to succeed in the next stages of their education and as adults in the workforce of the future.