At Wigton Moor, we are passionate about reading and we truly believe that books are the key to a successful future, therefore all our learning stems from a solid foundation of oracy and communication. Our belief is that if you can say it, you can read it and then you can write it.

Reading for pleasure is at the centre of what we do at and we select varied, challenging and high-quality texts according to the needs and interests of the pupils. Along with the Equality Council we have developed the representation of different cultures in our books and the children are encouraged to find books with characters like them.  Our Book Talk sessions in class introduce the children to a variety of high-quality texts and encourage dialogue around reading. We also use a variety of read out loud strategies and we have recently developed echo reading to develop prosody by modelling exactly how a text should be read.

We provide children with a range of reading opportunities in order to develop their skills and love of reading.

The Scarborough reading rope is used to develop the skills that children need to become prolific readers. We use a consistent, balanced and engaging approach to developing reading, which threads together word recognition and language comprehension. In order to be familiar with the range of questions children need to answer, we use VIPERS to develop their comprehension strategies.

Vipers stands for Vocabulary Inference Prediction Explanation Retrieval Sequence or Summarise

Early Reading

Children begin learning the basic building blocks of reading: PHONICS.

Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing in the English language by developing learners' phonemic awareness:

The ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes in order to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them.  In early reading children learn to recognise and put together 'sounds' to make words. They eventually link this to spelling a word and writing the word. Pupils are also taught "tricky words" that are not phonetically regular. Once children are able to recognise a basic range of sounds and put them together to make words they are offered opportunities to read these sounds as a variety of words and sentences.  As confidence and ability grows, children read phonically matched books.

Wigton Moor base their phonics teaching on Essential Letters and Sounds. We aim to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. Our planning sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills with the aim of the children becoming fluent readers by age seven.  Children needing further support in phonics benefit from targeted interventions in both KS1 and KS2. 

Reading is very important at Wigton Moor; we know that children who read regularly perform better at school.

To promote reading and reading for enjoyment, every year the library team appoint one ‘Reading Ambassador’ per class across years 3, 4 and 5, in addition to a team of Year 6 Reading Ambassadors to support them with all sorts of reading related activities.

Looking for Reading Ideas?

Click on the links below for some great reading resources!

https://library.thenational.academy/

https://www.booktrust.org.uk/books-and-reading/have-some-fun/fun-at-home-with-authors-and-illustrators/

Or you could consider joining the local library if you would like to borrow any e-books.

https://www.leeds.gov.uk/leisure/libraries/joining-the-library

The Book of Hopes edited by Katherine Rundell

Click on the link to read 'a magical collection of  short stories, poems, essays and pictures'.

Copies of the book have been presented to school and we look forward to sharing them in classes around school too.