Reading

Reading is the gateway to accessing an enriching curriculum and, as such, reading is at the
centre of our curriculum. We aim to foster a love of books and reading and provide children
with a range of reading skills from early reading where they will listen to, hear and play with
sounds, to the end of Key Stage 2 where they will have a deep understanding of the language
they read and will have access to, and enjoy, a range of genres. We aim to provide children
with a variety of reading experiences and a chance to understand what it means to be a
reader and, indeed, an author. We invite visitors into school to share their own reading
experiences and find opportunities for the children within school to share their own reading
experiences with each other.

For those children where reading is a difficult skill to acquire, we aim to immerse them in
reading opportunities to ensure a rich vocabulary is developed. From teachers reading for
pleasure to all children in school, independent reading sessions and guided reading sessions,
the love for and pleasure of reading will be encouraged. Our reading resources will support
all stages of reading and support and intervention will be in place to ensure all children at
Levendale make the best progress they can in this area. By ensuring that all children becoming
fluent and confident readers, we can ensure that they are best placed to access the next stages
in their learning.

Our overall aims for the development of children’s reading in school are for children to:

• read easily, fluently and with good understanding
• develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
• acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of
linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
• appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds

At Levendale, we use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds systematic synthetic phonics programme to help structure and deliver our phonics provision within school.

From September 2021, all schools are expected to use a DFE-approved and validated phonics programme. We have chosen to use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds (LWLAS) programme to help structure and deliver phonics provision at Levendale.

Please refer to our Reading Curriculum document for further details.

Project Code X

Children in Y2, Y3 and Y4 who might have some difficulties with phonic acquisition and/or reading comprehension are incorporated into our Project Code X programme which helps to develop phonics skills and boost reading comprehension skills in a fun and vibrant manner. This is a very successful intervention scheme that has been proven to work well in the past two years since it was introduced in school.

Reading Schemes

Our main reading scheme in school for children to work through is the Collins Big Cat scheme. These books have been developed to dovetail with the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds programme so that children are reading books closely matched to their phonic ability. Once they develop into fluent and confident readers, they access our fiction library as ‘free readers’ where there is a wide range of books to choose from to excite and enthuse all ages and abilities.

For further information regarding the teaching of reading (or any other queries regarding English in general), please contact your child’s class teacher in the first instance or please feel free to make an appointment with Mrs Carnelly, our English subject leader.