Reading and Phonics at Oakdale Junior School

The reading curriculum at Oakdale, steeped in the arts and rooted in equity, allows our children to develop a rich vocabulary, so that they can delve deeply into more challenging and inspiring texts. With their skills in oracy, which are embedded our class texts, and their growing understanding of the world around them, our children feel empowered to take risks with their opinions and ideas, opening pathways for them to succeed in life. Our aim is to provide a nurturing and extensive platform, from which children can strive to remove barriers to success, and develop and acquire reading skills in a progressive, but holistic way.  We are determined that every child will learn to read.  

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Reading is an interactive process that involves drawing upon knowledge and experience of the world, and being able to extract information, challenging views and opinions. The developing reader needs to acquire specific skills in order to make sense of the written word. These skills are inherent within our reading lessons, with the main emphasis on the child being able to develop their skills when reading challenging texts (for example summarising, clarifying, making predictions, skimming and scanning, visualising, describing and questioning). 

Children have numerous opportunities to read independently, with partners, in groups and with the whole class. Leaders and teachers have high expectations of children’s reading and believe that children’s engagement of our inspiring texts has a direct impact on progress in oracy and writing.

We use Read Write Inc. to support the development of early reading skills for children who have not passed their phonics test in Key Stage 1 and for any children throughout the school that need support. This intervention provides a systematic and methodical approach to the teaching of phonics and an effective assessment to support progress.  This scheme has been recommended as a validated systemic synthetic phonic programme by the DfE.  This consistent and progressive programme takes place on a daily basis and is delivered by trained LSAs. It is monitored by our Assistant Head for Inclusion and our English Lead but all teaching staff have been trained in it's approach.