At St Swithun's we are passionate about reading and writing. We believe that reading gives children an inner wellspring that they can draw on throughout their lives and helps them to connect with their own and others' feelings and experiences.

We aim to develop a deep love of reading through rich interractions with books that sets them on a lifelong literary journey...

We do this by:

1. securing children's decoding skills through systematic phonics teaching from Early Years
2. whole class teaching of comprehension skills through Reciprocal Reading
3. small group Guided Reading, where children practice Reciprocal Reading strategies
4. home reading and sharing of personal book recommendations through class 'Book talk' time
5. daily whole class story time

 with their own and others' feelings and experiences.

We aim to develop a deep love of reading through rich interractions with books that sets them on a lifelong literary journey...

We do this by:

1. securing children's decoding skills through systematic phonics teaching from Early Years
2. whole class teaching of comprehension skills through Reciprocal Reading
3. small group Guided Reading, where children practice Reciprocal Reading strategies
4. home reading and sharing of personal book recommendations through class 'Book talk' time
5. daily whole class story time
6. Termly visits to the local library: https://www.inspireculture.org.uk/reading-information/find-a-library/retford-library/

How we teach your child to read - and to love reading forever!

Phonics - F1, F2 and Year 1:

Your child's early reading begins with daily systematic synthetic phonics. We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programmme that has been validated by the DfE (see our Phonics web page)

Alongside daily (or twice daily for catch up) phonics, all children in KS1 have 3 'Reading Practice' sessions each week:

1) Decodng

2) Prosody (reading with expression)

3) Comprehension

We are passionate about teaching children to be successful readers who enjoy the power of language and who can read with expression to engage others in the magic of the spoken word.

Children read using high quality Collins Big Cat reading books. These are pitched at the child's phonics phase so that every child can experience success. They are taken home to read with parents after thjeir 3rd reading practice session. This means that children and parents can celebrate the joy of successful reading together.

Colour banded reading books - From Year 2

If your child has completed the phonics programme, they will initially be reading a colour banded book (orange - lime). The purpose of the colour banding is to help newly fluent children to select books that are accessible and graded accoridng to:

sentence length and structure, the number of words on a page, the complexity of the vocabulary and the maturity of the issues dealt with in the book

Please follow the link below to find out more about how we teach our children to read and inspire them with a passion for reading, using daily systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) and structured reading practice sessions through the Little Wandle validated programme.