Optima Reading
The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village. " Roald Dahl - Matilda
Optima Reading Sessions
Reading at Peter Hills is taught in separate 15-17 minute sessions across the school day rather than one block. Distributed learning like this means that skills are regularly repeated and this helps the children consolidate their understanding so they move to accuracy and fluency at a rapid rate.
Each session is broken down into skills building and applied learning with the children focusing in short bursts on synthesis and segmentation, phonic awareness and high frequency word recognition. These skills are then instantly applied as the whole class read a text together using their acquired skills to decode and make sense of what they're reading.
We have a 'real book' approach meaning that we place an importance on proper story books alongside reading scheme books because we want to expose our children to a richer vocabulary and less formulaic writing. For us we want the children to develop a love of reading rather than just being able to decode, this comes about from active engagement in stimulating stories where children are drawn in to the text and are excited to find out what happens next!
Learning to read should be a shared experience. In EYFS, parents are invited in on a weekly basis, to read with their children. In KS1, we use adults from across the school to ensure that every child is read with at least once a day. The more pleasurable the reading experience, the more likely they will quickly develop into independent and inquisitive readers. In Key Stage 2, the children enjoy whole class reading sessions every day. We are ambitious with our choice of books to expose the children to as many different authors and genres as possible. This can lead to some very stimulating discussions and acts as a catalyst to help our children become stronger writers.
