Reading at Weldon

At Weldon C.E Primary School, it is our vision to create a lifelong long love of reading. We believe that every child should read for pleasure. We are striving to create a passionate reading community in order to develop enthusiastic and confident readers. Through our reading curriculum, we aim to provide our children with rich and exciting opportunities that develop them socially, emotionally and intellectually and build within them a real love of reading that will stay with them forever.

Primarily we aim to achieve this through the development of a curriculum that immerses children in literature and the spoken word. Daily exposure to books and reading will enable our children to hear written English in its correct form, develop listening skills and introduce then to a wide variety of books, genres and authors.

Every classroom has a poster displaying 50 suggested reads for that specific year group. With Christmas around the corner and birthdays throughout the year It would be great for the children to perhaps add these suggestions onto their gift lists. The children around school have already started to talk about which books they would like to read and we can sense a buzz of excitement.

Displayed on our website is a selection of our reading and writing environments around school and within the classrooms. The children and staff are proud to showcase their work and Weldon’s love of reading.

We use one synthetic phonics programme from YR to Y2: We use Little Wandle to teach phonics and graphic knowledge (common exception words and tricky words). We supplement this scheme with relevant materials that match the sets and phases and have fidelity to Little Wandle.

Using this programme, we are confident that: - grapheme/phoneme (letter/sound) correspondences are taught in a clearly defined, incremental sequence; - we introduce children very early on to a defined initial group of consonants and vowels, enabling them to read and spell as soon as possible many simple CVC words; - children are taught the highly important skill of blending phonemes, in order, all through a word to read it; - children are taught to apply the skills of segmenting words into their constituent phonemes to spell; blending and segmenting are reversible processes. - Multi-sensory activities used are interesting and engaging but firmly focused on intensifying the learning associated with its phonic goal.

The programme starts almost immediately children enter Reception, from the second week of starting school