Reading At Northside

We believe, just as Dr Seuss, that

“The more that you read, the more things you will know.

 The more that you learn the more places you'll go.”

Our vision for children at Northside is for them to develop a love of literature and become fluent readers who love nothing more than to spend quality time with a ‘Terrific Text’.

Reading is at the centre of all our children’s learning and we instil an attitude of ‘reading for pleasure’ from Early Years all the way through to Year 6 and including the adults within the school. Our library is the hub of the school and outside reading dens encourage reading in free time.

Phonics At Northside

This term, we will be beginning to use Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised-a validated systematic synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Nursery/Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. As a result, all our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read. At Northside, we also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum. We have a strong focus on language development for our children because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.

Please read our English Policy for more information about how phonics is taught, using this programme. To see examples, resources and for parent support, please click on the link below.

Reading is celebrated each week in a whole school assembly with certificates for achievements as well as having the opportunity to select a book for ‘Golden Ticket’ winners. Teaching staff are members of our book club and read a focused book each half term.

We achieve this through starting with Phonics (using Little Wandle-see link above for more information), developing to shared reading using banded books, progressing to whole class guided reading using high quality texts and achieving a love of reading through a broad range of genres for pleasure. We use DERIC to teach the skills of comprehension though whole class daily guided reading.

DERIC stands for:

• D: Decoding words
• E: Explaining new vocabulary
• R: Retrieving information
• I: Interpreting information
• C: Choice (thinking about the choices made by the author/director/artist)

Independent Reading

All children are catered for through appropriate texts, tightly linked to their ability.

• In Early Years, children read books that are linked to the phonics they are learning in class that week (Harper Collins Phonics Books) and that match our Little Wandle Phonics Programme. They are allowed to choose books from the Reading Corner and our Rhythm and Reading room to develop their independence in reading for pleasure. 
• In Key Stage One, children continue to read books that are linked to phonics (where needed) and move on to early chapter books when appropriate.
• Children in Years 1-6 follow the Reading Road Map programme which covers all genres using high-quality classics and recently released books. There are three levels of challenge for all genres.
• Drop Everything And Read (DEAR) is embedded across Key Stage Two, instilling the value and importance of independent reading, this happens straight after lunch time break wherever possible. 
• Children and parents write comments in their Reading Records, daily. This is monitored by staff and we contact parents if the children are not filling this in and to remind them of the necessity of reading.