Reading | St Mary's Catholic Primary School

Reading

At St Mary's we are passionate about teaching children to read and helping to develop their love of reading.

Our aim is to ensure all children are able to decode text as soon as possible and develop

their understanding of texts by reading widely and often from a young age.

Some ideas below may assist you in supporting your child to read; for more

information please come into school and discuss with your child's

class teacher on ways that we can help you.

Phonics

At St Mary's we use Read Write Inc resources.

Most children learn Set 1 Sounds in reception being able to blend these sounds together to read words and segment words into sounds for spelling. Set 1 sounds are shown here.
We also include;ck, ch,sh,th,ng,nk, qu in Set 1 sounds.

Most children learn Set 2 sounds in reception, these are sounds that have two or three letters in to make one sound. Some people describe these as long vowel sounds.

ay, ee, igh, ow, oo, oo, ou, oy, ar, or, air ,ir.

We aim for reception children to be able to blend these sounds when reading words and segment these sounds when spellings words.

Most children learn Set 3 sounds in Year 1. These are the alternative spellings of the Set 2 sounds and less common sounds used in English.

ea, oi, a_e, i_e, o_e, u_e, aw, are, ur, er, ow ,ai, oa, ew, ire, ear, ure, tion, cious, tious, e.

Children complete the national phonics screening check in June of Year 1. They are expected to be able to blend words including these Set 3 sounds in order to gain a pass mark.

Reading
At St Mary's, we greatly value parental support and one area where this has the most impact is reading. Within school, your child will read everyday during whole class, group or individual sessions but as with most things, the more practice the children get, the quicker their skills develop.

Accelerated Reader

In Key Stage One and Two, teachers use a computer program called Accelerated Reader to manage and monitor pupils' independent reading. Each child picks a book of their choice from their assessed level from our well-stocked Library and reads it at their own pace. When finished, the pupil takes a short quiz on the iPad which assesses their comprehension of the book. The quiz gives both the child and their teachers feedback based on their quiz results; which is used to help set targets and direct ongoing reading practise.

Teachers determine each child's reading level using results from the STAR Reading Tests, which are completed in the first week of every half term. STAR Reading Tests are computerised reading assessments that use computer-adaptive technology to assess pupils' fluency and comprehension skills. Questions continually adjust to the child's responses so if the child's response to a question is correct, the difficulty of the next question is increased. Furthermore, if a child misses a question, the difficulty of the next question is reduced.

Comprehension Sample Materials
You can also access some additional comprehension questions by clicking on the link below, you can also view sample SATs papers (for 2016) for key stages 1&2 using the web link below, which will give you an idea of what your child will be assessed against in year 2 and year 6.