Reading

At Paddocks we are committed to developing a love of reading and constantly promote reading for pleasure. All children are explicitly taught reading comprehension skills. We use the ‘Read with DERIC’ acronym to teach children the key skills involved to be a successful reader – decoding, explanation, retrieval, interpretation and understanding an author’s choices. This is done using a variety of exciting texts and supported through the use of the Rising Stars Cracking Comprehension materials. Children participate in regular sessions where teachers encourage whole class, paired and independent analysis of the text. Pupils are taught to look for evidence when answering questions and encouraged to discuss their opinions of books they have read.

Through their DERIC lessons, teachers promote reading accuracy, automaticity and prosody:

Accuracy (reading words correctly)

Reading accurately means to decode and read words correctly. It is the ability to apply knowledge of letter-sound relationships when reading and saying written words. Pupils’ level of accuracy will impact their speed and ease of reading.

Automaticity (reading words at an appropriate speed without great effort)

Readers must be able to decode words without thinking about the decoding. Reading with automaticity is reading words on sight automatically and at an appropriate pace. It feels and sounds effortless for pupils.

Prosody (appropriate stress and intonation)

Prosody is reading aloud (and silently in the reader’s head) with appropriate use of stress, intonation and expression. It requires both reading accuracy and a level of comprehension. Understanding words and ideas enables pupils to make decisions about how they might vary their volume, phrasing, smoothness, and pace to reflect emotion, emphasis or tone. Reading with prosody sounds interesting and engaging to others.

Children have access to class libraries, the whole school library and home reading books. Our class libraries have a range of topic specific books that are changed each half term.  In Early Years and Key Stage 1, children also have access to a wide range of phonetically decodable books like Rhino Readers and in Key Stage 2 each classroom is well stocked with a variety of free reader texts. Since 2018, we have also used ‘Accelerated Reader’ to develop reading skills which uses a combination of quality children’s literature and ICT to provide children with even more opportunities to develop their reading skills both in school and at home.