Early reading and early language development:

As stated in the Early Reading Framework (2021), becoming a fluent reader begins at the earliest stages, before children even encounter a book, through the quality of their parents’ talk and the subsequent development of their vocabulary.

We therefore prioritise high quality talk in Early Years and Key Stage 1 through a number of schemes/approaches:

At St Joseph's, we follow the RWI phonics programme. RWI is a complete phonics programme with high quality training, assessment, intervention and resources (including decodable books). We train all new members of staff in the RWI approach and provide ongoing training and support for existing teachers through practice sessions and coaching. We carry out intervention to support pupils to ‘keep up’ with the programme. Children’s early independent reading is exclusively reading the RWI fully decodable books, ensuring that children are only asked to read books with sounds that they know.

All children from Nursery to Year 1 will access RWI Phonics and any children moving into Year 2 who are still accessing phonics will continue until the programme is finished. 

Talk Boost

Early Talk Boost is a language intervention carried out in Nursery. It is to help children with talking and understanding words, helping to boost their language skills. We carry out this as it proven to accelerate children’s progress in language and communication by an average of 6 months by the end of the nine week intervention.

Children who are selected to take part in the intervention will attend three sessions per week during circle/story time, each lasting 15-20 minutes delivered by an early years practitioner. The sessions include activities that cover the foundation skills in speech, language and communication that children need for learning and understanding new words, as well as having conversations.

All children in Nursery complete this intervention as it helps with their school readiness skills. 

WellComm

All of the reception children are screened by the WellComm toolkit by our speech and language therapist.  It then identifies the speech and language needs of the children.

Any child who has delayed language skills below expected is given specific targets for either provision or targetted during an intervention.

We carry out the WellComm intervention 3 days out of the week in a quiet space with a skilled teaching assistant. This is to close the gap at set children up for life to improve their speech and language skills. 

Reading in Early Years and Year 1

The children who are accessing RWI Phonics will take two RWI books home which match their Phonics ability. The first book is the book they have read in their phonics lesson, their second book is an alternative phonics book on the same book band. These children will also take a 'share at home, library' book to enjoy reading with their grown ups. 

Year 2

Once pupils can read accurately and fluently, they move off the RWI programme and the related decodable books. They will then access Oxford Reading Tree and other reading models which are matched to their reading ability. 

All children have full access to the school library and take home a new library book each week. 

For a small minority of children, who have not completed the RWI phonics programme, they will remain on Phonics and will continue to take a reading book home that match their phonics level. 

Guided Reading in Year 2 

Once children have completed the RWI programme, they move to whole class guided reading sessions, where we aim to promote a love of reading and exposure to children with carefully selected texts. The texts ensure that all children are exposed to a range of authors, genres and cultures. We model reading fluently to the children, as well as asking the children to read aloud independently, in partners or as a group. We believe that being able to read fluently is the key to success and understanding what is read is vital. In our guided reading sessions we encourage book talk and promote discussions around vocabulary through the use of focussed questioning.