Our Vision
Through reading, our children will:
- LOVE reading as soon as they begin school,
- become confident, fluent readers who leave Coleham ready to continue their reading journey,
- ENJOY reading for pleasure and information,
- be able to use the skills taught to unpick the texts,
- be reading at a level that is at least age-related.
Our Progression Document
READING Progression 2024-2025
Leadership
Reading is led by Teachers Mrs Stennett and Mrs Rank with Business Manager Miss Othen supporting Reading for Pleasure.
Our Reading Approach
Guided Reading
At Coleham we teach reading using the John Murray approach to guided reading. Children in EYFS and year 1 follow a shared reading approach through John Murray’s reading rocketeers. The children are able to develop their reading skills through high quality discussion and begin to understand what has been read and create links both within the text and beyond. These skills allow them to continue their reading journey up the school. From years 2-6, children have four guided reading sessions across the week. Using a chosen text, pupils will focus on orientation, vocabulary and reasoning building up to a final application. This approach helps the children develop and embed core reading skills and become more confident readers. The children don’t just read the given texts, they unpick them with the support of the adult leading the session. They also learn the skills to reason and infer which therefore allows them to build a greater understanding of the given text.
Reading to Write
Brilliant readers will become brilliant writers so our creative reading is closely aligned to our Creative Writing. Where we immerse the developing reader in high quality texts, use technology to engage readers and encourage them to write with passion and give readers a reason to write, a real audience and authentic purpose.
Picture Book Studies
Picture book studies also form part of our reading approach throughout the school. To foster a love of reading, we must discover incredible books.
- Books that help us to become kind, empathetic, well-rounded individuals.
- Books that make us laugh, make us gasp, make us stop and think, make us curious about the world in which we live.
- Books that encourage us to become lovers of language, lovers of literature and readers for life.
Picture Books have been carefully selected and sequenced for every year group.
Teaching Phonics
At Coleham School, we believe that phonics is fundamental in helping children build the necessary foundations to develop into fluent, confident and passionate readers and writers. Here at Coleham we have developed our own systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme based on the principals and structure of Letters and Sounds. This approach is supplemented by the Phonics Play planning and resources.
In EYFS and Key Stage 1 the small daily group sessions are invaluable and allow the children to prepare for the Year one phonics screening check. This is a statutory assessment where your child’s phonic knowledge will be assessed. The results of this screening check will be shared with parents and carers in July. To support our phonics teaching we use Phonics Play which allows the children to interact in fun games to help them learn to blend, segment and spell. To support parents with phonics at home we run parent information sessions in school.
Reading at home
Reading with your child is the most useful, productive, powerful and enjoyable activity to do at home that will not only help them develop personally and achieve at school but also strengthen your relationship. That’s why we left weekly homework behind some years ago; so we expect every family to read each night! Home reads should be recorded in your child’s Reading Diary. This could be listening to your child read, an adult reading to a child or sharing a story together. We want to make sure EVERY child (and grown-up) at Coleham Primary School LOVES reading as much as their teachers do!
Reading with your child is a lot more than just hearing them read their school books – here are some ideas to help you and your child develop a love of reading:
- Help them with their phonics sounds as they read
- Read to them; model how a story should be read with exciting pitch, tone, pause, punctuation and character voice
- Read a range of different types of text – NOT JUST THEIR SCHOOL BOOK!
- Discuss what they are reading: ask questions about what might happen next and about what has already happened
- Share your favourite books
- Visit the Shrewsbury Library – IT’S FREE!
- Make time for stories EVERY night: a routine is always good and story time can be a very special time for children and the parents/carers to share together.
Books in school
It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading!
We’re lucky to have staff in our team that love reading, from our Staff Book Club to individuals that adore children’s books 😀
For our pupils to LOVE reading, we want our book shelves to replicate a book shop, full of brightly coloured covers, emerging new authors, books that are appealing and relevant to today and celebrate the children’s passions ⚽️🎮 and just like a book shop, new books should be available regularly.
We have a constant stream of books coming in and out of school as we remove books that have been worn out from so much reading and top up with fresh titles. Each book is thoughtfully selected before it enters our shelves and our Pupil Librarians help to set up new stock. We are relentless in our aim of holding quality literature & illustration that deserve the children’s attention. Each summer we meticulously check every book and every shelf and top up with those favourites that are missing ready for a brand new year of READING!
Every classroom has its own Book Corner and our school library houses our Non-fiction Topic Boxes and lots more phonics & fiction books as an over flow so that all children have access to books they desire. We regularly add new releases, phonics home readers, favourite series that are firm favourites with the children and books that help develop empathy in children! Check out @empathylabuk for some brilliant recommended reads for children. Our books are carefully placed too, to tie in with the curriculum, for example Year 5 shelves will have Greek and Viking fiction stories to complement their history topics.
Thank you everybody who helps us by purchasing books from our Amazon Wish List and donating pre-loved books to school. It makes all the difference.
Celebrating Reading
We LOVE reading at Coleham and want the children to enjoy reading. The best way to do this is to let the children choose the books that they LOVE to read. Popular favourites in school are Football Heroes, Storey Treehouse and Diary of a Wimpy Kid collections! We have a great library in school and classroom book corners full of new and modern books that are constantly refreshed. No dusty book jackets and outdated books live here!
We run a variety of initiatives and competitions to keep reading FUN and high profile such as Reading Buddies, Comic Cart, World Book Day Pop-Up Shop, Author & Illustrator events, the Secret Bookcase, Top Ten books, outdoor book baskets the list is endless!
Author Visits
We regularly invite published authors to visit the school to tell us all about their books. We celebrate these in our Author Hall of Fame in school. You can have a browse through some of the names that have been here at Coleham in our Author page:
Author Visits
The Secret Bookcase
The Secret Bookcase is a very special bookcase, hidden in school, where all books have been signed by the author. Each week members of year 5 and 6 are awarded the special honour of visiting the Secret Bookcase.
Nursery Rhyme Week
We know how important rhyming and awareness of rhythm is for developing speech and language development and early reading. Nursery rhymes are no longer as prevalent in children’s home as they once were so we aim to promote rhyme to children and parents. We do this by celebrating World Nursery Rhyme Week and inviting parents in for musical rhyme sessions. Take a peek below:
Poetry Pandas
We have introduced an exciting new initiative to support Early Reading. Our very own ‘Poetry Pandas’ take away bags for children to share a love of poems and rhymes at home with their families. Our Poetry Panda bags are a great way to inspire reading at
home on your child’s literacy journey.
The Comic Cart
Our ‘Comic Carts’ store a range of Graphic Novels and Comics in school.
Huw Aaron, Graphic Novel illustrator and Author of Unfairies launched our Comic Carts in school!
Some of our children much prefer a comic style book and are drawn to popular series like Dog Man, Bunny vs Monkey and My Hero Academia. As we live in an increasingly visual and digital world, it’s important for pupils to critically think about the images we are exposed to on a daily basis. Graphic novels help to simultaneously develop verbal and visual literacy. Reading the text alone is never enough to get the full story, you have to interpret the images for clues on characters and plot development. They are a great alternative to reading novels and often contain complex vocabulary.
Watch our Comic Cart trailer below!
