Birchen Coppice Primary Academy

At Birchen Coppice Primary Academy, our core purpose is to ensure that children have the skills and knowledge to become lifelong readers who have a genuine love of reading. 

How we teach Reading

The teaching of reading has been designed around key research and effective practice in reading fluency and comprehension.

Reading fluency is the speed and accuracy of decoding words. Reading comprehension is the ability to understand what you are reading. Achieving an appropriate balance between reading fluency and reading comprehension is important to be a proficient reader. At Birchen Coppice Academy, we achieve this through whole class reading lessons, individual and group reading opportunities and specialist interventions.

How we teach reading fluency.

Fluency is the ability to read a text (either silently or aloud) with appropriate speed, accuracy and prosody. When reading aloud, fluent readers read in phrases and add intonation appropriately. Their reading is smooth and has expression.

Children who do not read with fluency sound choppy and awkward. Those students may have difficulty with decoding skills or they may just need more practice with speed and smoothness in reading. Fluency is also important for motivation; children who find reading laborious tend not to want to read!

In EYFS and KS1, children are taught the skills of fluency through the Read Write Inc programme. Children learn sounds in progressive sets and learn how to read words at speed with the graphemes they recognise (green words). Children also learn to read ‘red words’ and common exception words at speed so that they can read stories with pace, intonation and expression.  Children are taught how to ‘colour words’; learning how to be a storyteller and bring stories to life. Please see phonics policy for how we teach early reading and phonics. 

Books and home readers are progressive and matched to their level of phonic knowledge and word recognition. Children are taught at a challenge level. Those that need extra support receive phonics tutoring so that they can ‘keep up’ with the pace of the system.

In addition to this, children are exposed to a wide range of stories and take part in many oral storytelling activities. Texts are mapped across the curriculum and whole class story times are planned. In KS1, pupils are introduced to fluency lessons in English. In EYFS, the weekly book/story is central to all learning and teaching opportunities and a wide selection of familiar, topic related or skills based books are available in continuous provision.

In KS2, fluency is developed primarily within English and is an integral part of comprehension and reading lessons. Books are mapped so that skills in fluency are progressively built on. Texts are progressive in vocabulary, themes and topics; these are at an age appropriate level for each year group.  The Rubric Fluency Model is used to assess and support the teaching of reading fluency. This is a diagnostic assessment into oral fluency skills of expression and volume, phrasing, smoothness and pace.

How we teach reading comprehension

Comprehension is the ability to read a text and understand its meaning. At Birchen Coppice Academy, we teach reading comprehension 2 – 3 times per week. Teachers use the teaching comprehension model below to plan lessons. This model not only informs the teaching of reading in English lessons but in all areas across the curriculum.

The comprehension model is a continuous cycle of five key stages: activating prior knowledge, predict, clarify, ask questions and summarise. The National Curriculum reading domains: vocabulary, author choice, compare, contrast and comment, retrieval, inference, summary and prediction, are not taught explicitly but are combined and interlinked into a five stage teaching approach.

1. Activating prior knowledge

We activate prior knowledge so that we have a starting point to the information the child has to a subject, topic or theme. It identifies vocabulary barriers, misconceptions the child may have and engages the reader more quickly with the subject of the text. In also enables the reader to make more plausible inferences and predictions to what they read. 

2. Predict

When predicting, the reader is anticipating what will come next in the text, based on appropriate prior knowledge, the structure and content of the text, and what they have previously read. This is important because it encourages pupils to think ahead before reading and it gives the reader a purpose - as a reader, we read to reject or confirm a prediction or hypothesis. Predictions are always inference; these may change as the reader gathers more information but should be plausible and logical.

Clarify

The clarify stage of the lesson is where the children identify words and phrases that are unfamiliar. Through discussion, pupils work out what particular words, phrases and concepts mean in the context of the story. A good reader will always look to clarify their understanding of a text and not skip over words or phrases they do not understand. 

3. Ask questions

Like clarifying, questioning is a way that readers deal with and sort things in a text which confuse them or which are unclear. The questioning section is about addressing the bigger topics, themes and ideas, either explicitly or implicitly.

4. Summarise

The summary stage gets the group to agree on the key information that they have gained from reading. A summary should identify the main or most important information in the section they have read and sum up the passage in a few sentences. Summarising a text in a pupils own words requires information to be understood and transformed.

How we assess pupils

In KS2, we use the Rubric Fluency Model to assess fluency and PIRA to test comprehension. These are completed in alternative half terms. Alongside this, we use the Reading Quadrant to identify those pupils at risk of falling behind. For children that need support in comprehension, they take part in the Reciprocal Reading intervention programme. Children that need additional decoding and word recognition support take part in a phonics group or receive 1:1 Read Write Inc tutoring. 

In EYFS and KS1 children are assessed every five weeks using the Read Write inc online assessment tool. This assesses pupil’s sound recognition, words they can segment and blend (green words) and words they can read with automaticity and speed.  Children are grouped according to their level of reading and taught at a challenge level.