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Reading at St Luke’s
At St Luke’s CE School, we believe that it is important that children learn to read fluently as quickly as possible so they can begin to gain knowledge for themselves.
We also believe that the personal satisfaction and fulfilment that reading brings has value in its own right. Reading for pleasure, both individually and with others, has a high profile at St Luke’s, with daily class story-times, well-stocked and diverse class libraries and an annual Book Week celebration in March.
Teaching Early Reading and Phonics
At St Luke’s, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. We teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics quickly in Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.
You can find Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Parent Page here.
We also model the application of phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum. Throughout the school, we have a strong focus on language development and vocabulary enrichment for our children because we know that speaking, listening and precision in language use are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.
Reading Books
We use fully decodable phonics reading books which are closely matched to the children’s phonics knowledge. Alongside this reading practice book, children in Reception and Year 1 also take home a sharing book to develop their reading for pleasure. When children are secure in Phase 5 of our phonics programme, we provide a wider range of banded books to help them to develop other skills essential to reading such as inference and prediction, and to help bridge the gap into richer reading.
In Key Stage 2, the children’s reading choices continue to be supported by our teaching staff to ensure that they are reading with the right amount of challenge and across a range of genres.
You can find up-to-date book recommendations for every primary age group here.