A Child's Journey in Reading at Headlands
At Headlands C of E (Junior, Infant & Nursery) School, reading is taught through a structured daily lesson focusing on three key fluency components: accuracy, automaticity, and prosody.
The school’s approach includes explicit modelling, paired/choral reading, independent responses, and a terminal “exam-style” question to build students’ confidence in comprehension and ready them for future assessments.
Phonics: Little Wandle Letters & Sounds Revised
Our Phonics teaching is delivered through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revisited. This centres on the understanding that children learn language by first hearing, then speaking, then reading and finally through writing. Phonics echoes this as children are exposed to the sounds of letters (phonemes) before being introduced the letter symbol (grapheme). As children become confident with groups of sounds, they will be able to blend them both aurally and through their reading to create words. As children move on to more complicated multi letter sounds (digraphs and trigraphs) their fuecncy with words will continue to expand until they are fluent with phonics (automatic blending).
There is a phonics screen check in year 1 to ensure children are confident at this stage.
Fluency
Once children are fluent in phonics, we move to fluency reading. This centres on longer pieces of text and children are taught to read with good expression and volume, phrasing and use of punctuation, smoothness, pace and encountering unknown words. Teachers model this through their own reading and by sharing their thought process. Children have the opportunity to practise this through reading as a group, guided by the teacher, in pairs and as a group. Fluency books are selected by children to replace their phonics book until they are fluent readers and ready for free reading choices from the library.
Our three key fluency components are as follows:
ACCURACY – accurate reading of sounds, words, phrases and sentences.
AUTOMATICITY – automatic recognition of sounds, words, phrases which builds confidence reading at length.
PROSODY – the patterns of language, the stress or meaning we illicit from reading.
Day 1
- Activation 5 mins
- Vocabulary 5 mins
- Modelled reading (teacher) 5 mins
- Assisted reading (teacher and pupils) (echo, slow) 10 mins
- Quick fire questions (assessing understanding) 5 mins
Day 2
- Recap vocabulary 5 mins
- Modelled reading (teacher) 5 mins
- Paired reading (pupils) 10–15 mins
- Question based discussion (talk about the text) 5–10 mins
Day 3
- Recap & build vocabulary 5 mins
- Teacher introduces text 5 mins
- Pupils participate and read aloud 10 mins
- Question based discussion (talk about the text) 10 mins
Day 4
- Recap vocabulary 5 mins
- Re-read the text 5 mins
- Re-cap discussion points (talk about the text) 5 mins
- Rubric question 5 mins
- Reader’s Theatre (performing the read) 10 mins
Comprehension
When children are ready for comprehension work, we run whole class reading lessons that centre on a carefully curated series of questions. First the children will read a text as a class using some strategies from their fluency work. Following this, the teacher will guid the children through a series of questions that support children to develop an area of their comprehension (retrieval, inference (meaning), prediction, summary, word meaning). The children have discussions at a class level, in pairs and have space for independent practise. This ensures children are building routines to support them in the development of their understanding of new and unfamiliar texts as they move through school.
Reading Volunteers
We are always looking for reading volunteers to read 1:1 with our children. Are you a member of the local community or a parent/guardian who would like to volunteer? To apply, please contact our school office for an application form via office@headlandsce.net.
Please note: All reading volunteers will need to undergo a DBS check and provide two references.