English- Reading

Reading

What does reading look like at Great Missenden?

Our Intent:

At Great Missenden, we are readers. We believe in developing a culture that encourages a desire and love for reading whilst providing a diverse range of texts for all pupils to access. The enjoyment of reading is crucial to developing pupils’ reading interests and habits and we encourage children to listen to others’ reading, share their own reading and spend time discussing the books and authors they enjoy. We aim for all of our children to leave primary school with the ability to read confidently and enjoy a wide range of texts and become lifelong readers. In EYFS and Key Stage 1, we teach reading skills through the use of Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised to develop pupils’ phonics, decoding, prosody and comprehension skills and in Key Stage 2, the use of VIPERS supports our reading comprehension skills. Those who need additional support with their phonics or reading comprehension receive interventions to ensure pupils’ reading needs are met as we believe this is crucial to accessing the curriculum and life beyond Great Missenden school.

Boom Reader - Parents/Family App

Boom Reader have listened carefully to parental feedback and a recent update will make logging reading easier and clearer and includes many improvements parents and carers have asked for.

Attached is an introduction to using Boom Reader - including a QR code to their information page, a quick-start guide to using Boom Reader and a video is available to watch online here too: https://vimeo.com/531349764

At school, we are really fortunate to have a number of volunteer readers regularly reading with the children and using Boom Reader to record this.

As school staff, we recently led some LSA training on how we are using this moving forward as a school. We are keen to continue using Boom Reader to track when children are recording their reading at home, what they are reading and how often. We would love to encourage more children to be recording their thoughts on the books they are reading as part of their pupil comments which are enabled.

Reading Recommendations

Browse for a book one of your peers has recommended or add another to our growing list of books we would suggest for others!

Year 1 and 2: https://padlet.com/GreatMissendenReading/KS1books

Year 3 and 4: https://padlet.com/GreatMissendenReading/LKS2

Year 5 and 6: https://padlet.com/GreatMissendenReading/UKS2

What our staff and pupils think about reading at Great Missenden

Year 3:

If you can read, you can write and you need both for nearly everything!

I can imagine it in my head. It gets me intrigued and my imagination runs wild.

I enjoyed reading the extract in 

Year 4:

I like it when we act out the stories to help us to understand how they work and why they’re good.

I like my teacher’s reading because her wonderful voices help me understand character and we always discuss new words to build our vocabulary.

It helps you write, it helps you understand, it helps you with EVERYTHING?

Year 5: 

In reading lessons we learn new words, which builds our vocabulary, which means we can become better authors.

Reading gives us greater meaning it gives us characters to aspire to.

Year 6:

We understand the books we read more through discussion, we see more by listening to other people’s opinions.

Staff member/parent:

The new Guided Reading structure (Autumn 2021), in my opinion, has been a huge success (speaking as an LSA and parents at the school). It is head and shoulders above anything I've seen practised for Guided Reading before, with fun and interesting topics that really grab the children's attention. In particular the poetry and songs have been great at encouraging interesting discussions with the children, and the set questions are clear and easy to follow meaning that comprehension practice is still challenging but achievable for every child.

Staff member:

There are clearer links to VIPERS with more structure and the children enjoy reading more and more throughout the year.