Reading at Greenleas

Greenleas is proud of the importance reading has in our curriculum, which empowers our children to become confident, enthusiastic, independent readers. Through a carefully planned programme of teaching and learning, children progress from hearing and recognising sounds in the environment, through segmenting and blending the sounds in words, to developing comprehension, fluency and resilience in reading independently across a range of topics and genres. In learning to read, Greenleas children understand that they can read to learn, and our creative curriculum supports this ideology by inspiring our children to read more in order to broaden and deepen their knowledge. This prepares them well for future study as they transition to middle school.

1. Letting children select their own reading books choosing from a range of reading schemes
2. Ensuring children are exposed to a range of genres, both fiction and non-fiction
3. Having a clear reading progression system that runs throughout the school
4. Conferencing regularly with children about their strengths and areas for development
5. Celebrating reading success weekly as a whole school during assembly
6. Maximising reading opportunities across the curriculum
7. Setting high expectations for reading outside of school (Reading four times a week to achieve a Clover stamp)
8. Liaising with parents via children’s reading records
9. Encouraging a love of reading and reading for enjoyment
10. Richly resourced library at each site for the children to access 
11. Taking part in national and local reading celebrations e.g. World Book Day and the Summer Reading Challenge

Greenleas School Approach to Reading

Reading is taught through a blend of methods; primarily in the lower years through the Letters and Sounds synthetic phonics programme which is reinforced by weekly spellings to learn at home and regular reading to an adult for decoding and comprehension. As the children progress this is extended to include guided reading and independent comprehension work to build skills in appreciation, interpretation, fact-finding, inference and deduction.

The school does not subscribe to a single reading scheme, but offers the children a wide selection of fiction and non-fiction texts from a group of well-known publishers, (Oxford Reading Tree, Collins, Pearson and others). These are colour banded according to difficulty and progress from purely phonics-based decodable material for early readers, to books with a more advanced writing style and/or subject matter. Additionally reading books are supplemented by stock from the Bedfordshire Schools Library Service from which children can borrow one title per week to promote reading for information and pleasure. Children are also encouraged to read in class frequently through shared reading activities and opportunities for quiet reading in class.