Reading at Drake

Reading is a crucial part of a child's education. Reading opens doors to new worlds, new ideas, opposing opinions, experiences of others, life in an unknown country or era and a wealth of information and facts to support learning. At Drake, reading is part of our everyday practice in every classroom. As soon as children start in Reception, they are exposed to stories and rhymes and take home a school library book to share with their family. The children very quickly start to learn their phonics enabling them to read words, then sentences and later books.

In every class at school, the children have opportunities to

• Choose books that they would like to read or listen to
• Read daily
• Listen to teachers read throughout the week
• Read to an adult regularly
• Learn about a class text or author
• Make connections between their reading and their learning across the curriculum as well as to their own lives and experiences
• Discuss texts using different reading strategies 
  • Vocabulary - explore new words and uses in different contexts
  • Inference - use clues in the text to 'work out' what is happening
  • Prediction - make predictions about what might happen next or later in the story by using their own knowledge and information in the text.
  • Explanation - discuss and explain what has happened using direct references to the text to support these explanations
  • Retrieval - find specific examples in text to identify key details
  • Summary - summarise information from more than one paragraph
  • Sequence - order the key events in the story

Reading Diary

At school, the children are encouraged to record their reading in their reading diary. We know that this progresses as they get older. Teachers and learning support assistants will also record when they specifically listen to the children read on a 1:1 or small group basis rather than in a whole class reading time or phonics lesson.

In addition, we ask that parents record home reading in the reading diary so that Teachers can ensure and monitor regular reading and so that parents are part of this vital aspect of the children's education. Parents record the book and/or pages read with a short comment or initial. There is a section in the diary to record challenge words to practise and learn.

We start a new double page spread of the reading diary each week. This ensures that there is sufficient room for each reading activity to be recorded weekly.

Library areas

Drake offers a range of different places for children to read and access books. We have an Early Years and Key Stage 1 library with a wide range of fiction, non fiction and poetry picture books. The children enjoy looking through different books, sharing and listening to stories and choosing books to take home. Another selection of books is available for older children nearer to the Key Stage 2 classrooms. In addition, each classroom has a selection of books and their own bookshelves with age appropriate texts.

Reading Cafes 

In Autumn term 2022, we invited parents in school for Reading Cafes.  There were various activities in each Café, including: learning a model text in the ‘Talk for Writing’ structure; making puppets to support speech development and story retelling; adults and children able to access high quality texts; making tin foil people to support the text of Iron Man; and comprehension activities to support Year 6 SATS.

Please take a look at the wonderful photos.