Reading At Prudhoe Castle First School

At Prudhoe Castle First School we are passionate about reading. Reading is a vital skill that supports children’s learning across the whole curriculum. We want children in our school to become enthusiastic, independent and reflective readers. We want our children to enjoy reading and to use the skill to become independent learning citizens in our society.

In our school, we strive to give pupils a stimulating and engaging curriculum and learning environment, where reading materials are presented in an attractive and inviting way. Furthermore, within reading lessons we create an environment that stimulates the generation of ideas from texts where all ideas are accepted and valued. Teachers will act as role models in their enthusiasm for both reading and writing by keeping up to date with current children’s literature.

Our reading curriculum features texts from Pie Corbett’s recommended reading spine, books that support understanding of a diverse society and a range of classic and modern texts and poetry.

Reading in Early Years

Reading is a high priority within Early Years and underpins everything we do. This includes making sure topics taught are built around a wide selection of books linked to children’s interests. In Reception, children are taught the technical skills of reading through systematic synthetic phonics lessons following Little Wandle- Letters and Sounds revised. Children are also taught how to talk about books through whole class Guided Reading. Books chosen for Guided Reading sessions are carefully selected to extend our children’s learning experiences and interests as well as to provide them with opportunities to deepen their cultural capital.

Reading in Key Stages 1 and 2

Children in Years 1-4 continue to be supported with developing their phonic knowledge through Little Wandle, reading fluency, accuracy and stamina as well as the progression of comprehension skills. This is achieved through both group and whole-class reading sessions and reading for pleasure. In key stage 2, children continue to build on their prior knowledge of phonics by exploring complex vocabulary, etymology, morphology and patterns in language.

Reading Spine

Writing

Since September 2024, Prudhoe Castle First School has embedded ‘Talk For Writing’ as our writing curriculum. ‘Talk For Writing’ (TFW) is an engaging, rigorous and creative teaching framework developed by Pie Corbett.  TFW is based on the principles of  imitation to innovation to independent application to help students develop writing skills for a range of purposes. 

Our aim at Prudhoe Castle through using the TFW approach is for children to become even more excited to read, write and express themselves. We aim for children to develop confidence in becoming articulate storytellers, readers and writers.  

What is Talk for Writing? Pie Corbett explains

Each focus story and unit of work lasts 3-4 weeks. The stories are progressive in content and language from Nursery to Year 4 using our carefully chosen reading spine.  The children are provided opportunities to study a range of fiction and non-fiction texts.  Throughout each module we focus on developing skills linked to a specific genre of writing using a scaffolded ladder of skills for each toolkit.   The children are supported throughout the unit to develop their writing and storytelling skills to complete their own independent piece of writing. 

Phases of the Talk for Writing approach

Useful links

Phonics- Little Wandle- Parents Page
Phonics- Little Wandle- Parents Presentation.pdf
HandwritingPolicy.pdf