Intent

Our ambition for our children at Priory Park Infant School is for each child to develop a lifelong love of reading. Our aim for our children is for them to make excellent progress in reading, developing into fluent, confident readers who have a good understanding of what they read. Children are exposed to high-quality, varied texts and immersed in vocabulary-rich learning environments to inspire and motivate them as readers.

Implementation

Phonics is taught daily in every class through our synthetic phonics program Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, ensuring children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. Reading is taught in a variety of ways, as well as in phonics. Children take part in guided reading practice sessions. All classes have a daily story time, sharing quality texts for pleasure. Reading also plays a large part in daily English lessons based on a quality text used throughout each term. Using a text as a basis for teaching allows explicit comprehension teaching, story telling and retelling, and vocabulary exploration.

A variety of reading enrichment experiences are embedded, such as author visits and sharing bedtime stories during book week, as well as accessing our well-stocked community library and in-school library to further develop children’s love of reading.

As children develop their phonics knowledge and skills, they may receive additional support in the form of daily keep-up or additional catch-up, as appropriate to the needs of each child. 

Impact

Children at Priory Park Infants enjoy reading and develop lifelong reading habits; reading for pleasure and reading for information. Children read audibly, accurately and coherently, adapting their voice to suit a range of purpose, audience or text type. Children are able to explain and discuss what they have read having developed their inference and deduction skills.