Reading

Oxford Reading Tree

At Sacred Heart, reading is mainly delivered through books and resources from the Oxford Reading Tree with a wide selection of fully decodable reading books for children to take home, to support their Read Write Inc. Phonics learning in the classroom, from Red Ditty through to Grey.

All Book Bag Books include notes for parents and carers on how to help their child at home with phonics.. These stories are carefully written using simple, natural-sounding language that children can understand. Key words are repeated throughout the storybooks so that children can gradually increase the number of words they can recognise and read.

As children progress in their reading, they are immersed in key stories, handpicked by world famous author Michael Morpurgo, to enthral children and develop and extend their reading experiences.

 

Supplementary schemes and ‘real books’

We supplement this reading scheme with a variety of other schemes within school as all children follow their own unique reading journey. Children have an opportunity to read books with a range of different genres and, as we value the importance of reading for pleasure, we have a huge amount of non reading scheme books, ‘real books’, that the children read as home readers and during guided reading.

 

Range of texts

At Sacred Heart we believe children should receive a broad and balanced reading diet. The range of high quality literature for the children to use will include:

 

  • stories and poems with familiar settings and those based on imaginary or fantasy worlds

  • texts from a variety of cultures and traditions

  • long established fiction

  • stories, plays and poems by significant children’s authors

  • classic poetry

  • retelling of traditional folk and fairy stories

  • myths and legends

  • stories, plays and poems with patterned, predictable and phonetically related language

  • stories and poems that are challenging in terms of length and vocabulary

  • on screen texts

  • play scripts

  • a wide range of non-fiction texts

 
We are very fortunate in having Birchfield Library close to school and the children visit here regularly. Reading Champions and other children visit weekly to have the opportunity to borrow a range of texts.
 
Parents are kept up to date with how to support their children with reading at home. Attached is information from workshops provided.