Reading

We encourage a love and respect of books and it is helpful when children spend time at home talking about books and reading.

We encourage parents and carers to read with their child every night. All children have a blue book bag and a Home Reading Record book. We invite parents to sign or make a comment to help support their child’s reading at home. Children have the opportunity to change their reading books regularly. From Reception, children are given a decodable book to read at home that will focus on the synthetic phonics that they have learned and that they are able to blend. Children will also bring a second, sharing book home to read and enjoy with their families.

As soon as children are able to blend they take a decodable book home to read, linked to their phonics learning and a book to share with their family.

We want all children at William Stockton to develop a life-long love of reading. As a result, this is our highest priority. Teachers read class books to pupils containing challenging and interesting novels exposing children to language and classic stories which they may find too challenging to read independently.

In EYFS and Key Stage 1, reading sessions which focus on the physicality of reading alonside the skills of comprehension take place. This will helps our pupils access all the other subject areas and ensure they are life-long learners.

In Key Stage 2, shared reading sessions take place 3 - 4 times a week focusing on the reading domains and ensuring that children are comprehending what they are reading. A variety of interesting and appeasing texts are chosen to support the wider curriculum and to ensure that children make links between what they have learnt. For the children who are yet to master the alphabetic code, catch up phonic sessions are provided to support the children in developing their knowledge of systematic sythentic phonics which will lead them to become independent readers.

From Y3 we launch our Accelerated Reader scheme. This encourages children to read a range of texts in return for certificates and a chance to 'up their word count.' The texts on the scheme challenge the children to read ambitious books they might not normally read, including classic books, non-fiction and poetry.

For those children who continue to require phonic teaching (early reading instruction), books are banded according to the grapheme-phoneme correspondence, this ensures that the books are fully decodable by the children. Adults are trained in early reading tuition to assist these children.

As children become more fluent readers, we colour band books, according to difficulty. Texts from different published reading schemes and picture books are included: fiction and non-fiction. Reading a variety of books develops good habits and independence. Children read different authors and types of text, such as poetry, stories, reports, explanations and recounts or diaries. They develop preferences and use the different styles in their own writing.

With challenging texts in school and taking home books at a comfort level, children gain fluency and mastery in both decoding and understanding their books. In the early years we develop decoding skills and then move to developing children’s inference and comprehension, whilst developing a rich and varied vocabulary.

Our aim is to nurture lifelong readers and hope children will curl up with a book and read their favourite stories over and over again. Just for the love of it!

The children are encouraged to visit the local library which has a good range of books for children and helps to encourage a love for reading!

We are very lucky at William Stockton and some keen readers from Year 5 and Year 6 have been given the opportunity to attend a reading club run by Passion for Learning. Click on the star to find out more:

Visit these websites with your log in details to read a book at your level:


For those children who require phonics teaching	For those children who no longer require phonics