Reading at St Ives Infant School
Reading opens doors - to imagined worlds, to knowledge, to escape, to encourage reflection. Our vision at St Ives Infants and Nursery School is to develop reading skills and to nurture a love of reading for learning and pleasure.
Children learn the skill of reading (segmenting and blending words) through their daily phonics lessons. We then send a book home each week at a stage in their phonics that they are secure in, allowing them to practise these skills. Children are encouraged to read each book with their adults at least three times, first to decode (the tricky part), second to re-read and develop some fluency and third to read with ease and understanding.
Once the children reach a stage in year 2 when they no longer rely on decoding to read and are developing a fluent pace in their reading, children are able to select their own books to take home.
Guided reading is taught daily as a whole class in Key Stage 1 and in groups in Reception. Here we focus on developing the children's understanding of the texts they read. Firstly through vocabulary and general knowledge, and then through skills such as information retrieval and inference (being reading detectives).