Reading Scheme 

Pupils at Christ Church are encouraged to read from entry into school.  Nursery pupils will share stories and nursery rhymes as part of the daily diet of reading.  Pupils are encouraged to take part in the 1000 Stories Scheme from the Autumn Term. Throughout the year, children develop their communication and language skills through the support of a well planned curriculum inline with Well Comm skills. As part of the Essential Letters and Sounds Foundation scheme, the children develop their listening skills by exploring and discriminating sounds around them. Oral blending is part of the daily offer in Nursery to allow the children to hear how sounds are put together to make words. In the Spring Term, Essential Letters and Sounds Foundation begins teaching Phase 2 sounds with a focus sound per week. As part of the teaching, the children learn a mnemonic and the grapheme phoneme correspondence. The children are also taught to hear the initial sound and learn to form the letter. Opportunities for embedding these Early Reading skills is planned within the classroom environment and outdoor learning. 

As pupils progress into Reception the teaching of reading will become more formalised. Essential Letters and Sounds will be the main tool used to help pupils develop their early reading skills and phonic awareness.  This is also where pupils will begin to use the school ‘Reading Scheme’.  A range of reading schemes are used to provide the children with a variety of fiction and non-fiction books that are fully decodable to read in Reception. Children are also given the opportunity to choose a 'Book for Sharing' that will be more challenging to read at home. 

From Year 1 through to Year 6 pupils will mainly follow the Project X Alien Adventures scheme, although these have been supplemented with extra mini schemes also produced by Oxford University Press.  This allows pupils a much richer and wider reading experience.  For those pupils who complete the scheme or are sufficiently accomplished readers then the opportunity is provided to become a ‘free reader’ and choose their own books from home or the school library.

The use of Reading Plus is now being used from Year 3 upwards. Each half term, Reading Plus is used as an assessment tool as well as being used throughout each week to teach children personalised skills responding to their needs shown through the assessments. Pupils complete a reading assessment that provides staff with the child's reading age. The reading ages link to a ZPD which allows pupils to choose a suitable Library book to take home and enjoy from our colour-coded library. 'Free Readers' are encouraged to use their ZPD to ensure their choice of book is both accessible and challenging.

Each week, pupils take part in a 'Big Reading' lesson in school. 'Big Reading' introduces pupils to four characters: Rex the Retriever, Expi the Explorer, Ansa the Analyser and Dood the Detective. These characters develop the pupil's ability to sequence, retrieve, infer and predict about different texts.

Oxford Owl is a free website where books can be accessed. Every child in Reception and Key Stage 1 have their own account that can be accessed from home. Teachers allocate a new book weekly that reflects each child's reading ability so they have an additional phonetically decodable book to share at home.