Reading at The Batt

At The Batt School, it is our whole school ethos which puts reading – and particularly reading for pleasure – at the heart of what we do. To be a ‘reader’ is central to a child’s understanding of the school curriculum and is of vital importance in life. The two areas that are essential for this are:

1. Word Reading: Good early phonics-based teaching of word-decoding skills. This helps children to recognise and understand the sounds that letter combinations make and to recognise and decode words.
2. Comprehension: Supporting and encouraging children to engage with reading through book talk and discussion about text.
   
   Fluent readers can access a full range of life experiences and can enjoy an amazing breadth of genres and writers. It is our moral obligation and passion to ensure that ALL children can access all areas of the curriculum and pursue topics which interest them. In order to achieve this, reading and writing skills are developed through a high-quality text based approach.

Exploration - Children will explore a wide range of literature including fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction texts.

Co-operation - Children will share their reading adventures with others - discussing and exchanging ideas, making recommendations and sharing their views through talk and writing.

Communication - Children will express their creative ideas through a range of talk, debate and drama opportunities.

Innovation - Children will learn to reflect on what they read, bringing their knowledge of a wide range of texts to make interpretations and judgements about what they read and and use their reading as a stimulus for writing.

Phonics at The Batt

At The Batt and St. Mary’s schools we follow the Essential Letters and Sounds systematic synthetic phonics programme. Phonics is how we teach children to read. It teaches children the link between letters and the sounds they represent and provides a strong foundation for reading.

We aim for our children to develop a strong orthographic map because being able to read most words fluently supports children in being free to focus on the meaning of what has been read. We combine daily high-quality phonics teaching alongside sharing ambitious high-quality texts with our children to promote a love of reading and to share with them the skills that are required to become lifelong readers.  

How We Teach Phonics at The Batt and St Mary’s:

• We follow Essential Letters and Sounds’ four-part lesson structure and teaching sequence: review, teach, practise and apply, which reduces cognitive load and supports our learners to 'read well, quickly'. The consistent structure of our lessons allows children to know what is coming next, what they need to do and how to achieve success. This makes it easier for children to learn the GPCs we are teaching (the alphabetic code) and to know how to apply this when reading.

• Whole-class teaching allows all children to access Quality First Teaching interventions are provided during the lesson by the class teacher to give targeted support for those children who need it.

• If a child requires further support, short and effective 1:1 interventions are provided that are tailored to their specific need such as oral blending or GPC recognition. 

• We ensure that all phonics teaching is delivered consistently, effectively and enthusiastically. We model segmenting and blending unfamiliar words and reading with expression to our children. 

• We provide regular opportunities throughout the school day for children to apply their learning and practice taught sounds. 

• We use 100% decodable books in phonics lessons so that children can directly apply their new knowledge and phonic skills at an appropriate level. In phonics, we will only ever ask children to read books that are made up of sounds that they have already been taught. This ensures that they are confident, successful readers.

• We encourage parental involvement by inviting all parents to attend phonics workshops and giving them resources to support their children with the development of their phonics skills. We provide parents with personalised information to help them to support their child’s reading journey, such as which sounds their child is working towards and what Harder to Read and Spell Words they are learning.