Reading
We endeavour to deliver an innovative English Curriculum, where excellent early language development is promoted and written and oral communication, and creativity is a high priority.
Reading is very important to us at St Charles – we do everything we can to foster a love and enjoyment of reading, for our children. This includes reading a variety of different books in different contexts, as well as having a wide range of home readers for the children to enjoy.
Reading takes a high priority throughout the school and children are encouraged to read high quality texts and to read widely and deeply for pleasure and information. We follow the Read, Write Inc Literacy and Language programme where children acquire and apply the key skills of spelling, grammar and punctuation to their writing and opportunities are regularly provided for children to write clearly and accurately at length in a range of different styles. Our Whole Class Reading approach has been specifically developed by the staff at St Charles’ with our children in mind and focuses on developing reading skills using DERIC:
- Decode – sounding out and blending of words and then becoming more confident with reading words on sight.
- Explain – asking children to explain the meaning of words and being able to explain what is happening in the text they have read.
- Retrieve – asking children questions where the answer can be found in the text or pictures
- Interpret – children are use their inference skills to use clues in the text and what they already know to make suggestions about what they have read, using ‘because’ in their response.
- Choice – asking the children questions about why the author has chosen to make particular choices linked to layout / vocabulary/ characters, within the text.
