Reading Beyond Phonics

Reading Beyond Phonics

Building on from phonics and the consolidation of word reading in Reception and Year One, children from Year Two to Year Six, use the exciting range of Big Cat Collins reading books to help them develop an accomplished level of fluency and depth of comprehension.

Each year group moves through a carefully designed system of colour banded books, selected to grow in complexity, which enables them to grow confidence in fluency, prosody and expression before moving on to the skills required for successful reading comprehension. The colour banded system of book titles challenges the children as they move through the school in length, vocabulary exposure, complexity of themes, genre and content.

In class reading lessons, children are taught whole class texts, which rotate on a three weekly cycle. These class texts are age-related in expectation, so the children are being exposed to the kind of reading material specific to their age range and expected ability.

In these lessons, the children work through bespoke reading packs, written by the class teachers, which offer activities centered around the reading skills: predict, vocabulary, retrieve, infer, explain and summarise. Each reading lesson is structured in a similar way with the children reading a section of the text, before using their pack to work on the identified reading skill.  When working on the selected part of the text, the class teacher reads with a group of children, using high level questioning, alongside reading, to develop an understanding of what has been read. Depending on age, ability and year group, sometimes the section of text is read as a whole class, but in other areas of the school or where a need has been identified, small groups may read together, guided by a teacher or individuals may read alone with an adult.

 

As with all of our teaching, where a need has been identified and a child requires further support with their reading, whether that be within word recognition, fluency or comprehension, children can be placed on our ‘Rapid catch up’ pathway – an individualised, tailored scheme children can move through to help them make accelerated progress. In this approach, a child would receive an additional 15-minute intervention daily.  Two sessions recap the skills of decoding, recognition and fluency, and the other three sessions enable children to apply this knowledge in reading practice.  

 

By the end of Key Stage Two, usually during the summer term of Year Six, children become ‘free readers, having mastered the complexity of material within Big Cat Collins scheme.  This encourages them to develop their own sense of interest in terms of author and genre, through our rich and diverse library collections.