Reading At Northside

We believe, just as Dr Seuss, that

“The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn the more places you'll go.”

Our vision for children at Northside is for them to develop a love of literature and become fluent readers who love nothing more than to spend quality time with a ‘Terrific Text’.

Reading is at the centre of all our children’s learning and we instil an attitude of ‘reading for pleasure’ from Early Years all the way through to Year 6, including the adults within the school. Our newly relocated library is hugely popular with our children at lunchtime and our Reading Corners are much-loved places in all our classrooms.

Phonics At Northside

We use 'Little Wandle Letters and Sounds' - a validated systematic synthetic phonics programme - to teach our children to become fluent readers, a vital foundational skill at the heart of all that we do.  We start teaching phonics in a fun and engaging way in Nursery and follow the Little Wandle programme week by week in Reception and Year 1, with the aim of children passing the national Phonics Screening Test at the end of Year 1. Phonics teaching continues in Year 2 to ensure that each child becomes a fluent reader, using the Rapid Catch-Up scheme as necessary to ensure that any child who needs additional phonics teaching receives this.  Likewise, any children in KS2 who are not fluent readers yet will receive additional interventions to ensure they catch up as quickly as possible. As a result, our children are able to decode and read texts with a degree of automaticity which allows them to read with comprehension and understanding. Please read our Phonics Policy for more information about the teaching of phonics or click on the link below for advice about supporting your child as they learn. 

Little Wandle Phonics Resources for Parents

Reading comprehension at Northside

Alongside and beyond our phonics lessons, the children also learn to read with understanding, a crucial skill which will unlock the wider curriculum for them, and therefore ensure their progress and academic success.  From Year 1 onwards, children engage in daily whole-class reading lessons, when they enjoy and consider a range of different texts, from the worlds of both fiction and non-fiction. 

Each day, children have a discrete reading lesson of 30 minutes and, once a week, this is extended to an hour-long lesson. In these lessons, children explore texts in detail in a fun and engaging way, developing their love of books and their core reading comprehension skills.  To teach the skills of comprehension, we focus on the concept of DERIC.

DERIC stands for:

• D: Decoding words
• E: Explaining new vocabulary
• R: Retrieving information
• I: Interpreting information
• C: Choice (thinking about the choices made by the author/director/artist)

Each half-term, the children read a 'Terrific Text', which is chosen by the teacher as an example of high-quality writing. These texts also reflect our cultures, values, community and topics. 

Independent Reading

All children are encouraged to read independently, so that they develop a life-long habit of reading for pleasure.

• In Early Years, children read Little Wandle books that are linked to the phonics they are learning in class through the phonics programme. They are also encouraged to choose books from the Reading Corner and the library to develop their independence in reading for pleasure. 
• In Key Stage One, children continue to read books that are linked to phonics (where needed) and move on to early chapter books when appropriate.
• Children in Years 1-6 follow the Reading Road Map programme which covers all genres using high-quality classics and recently released books. There are three levels of challenge for all genres.
• Drop Everything And Read (DEAR) is embedded across Key Stage One and Two, instilling the value and importance of independent reading. This happens straight after lunch and is a wonderful moment of calm for the children, when they can lose themselves in the different worlds of their books. 
• Children and parents write comments in their Reading Records daily. This is monitored by staff to ensure that reading is completed at home on a daily basis. 
• We celebrate reading every week in our Celebration Assembly, when children are awarded Reading Road Map certificates for the amount of books they have read.