At Irk Valley, pupils have opportunities to undertake guided, shared and independent reading throughout the school.

In Early Years, each child will take part in a weekly guided reading session. This progresses to a daily guided reading session in Key Stage One. Children in Early Years and Key Stage One also receive a weekly one-to-one reading interview with an adult.

In Key Stage Two, children receive a daily whole-class reading session. They also have a reading interview with an adult at least once every two weeks.

At Irk Valley, a diverse range of staged reading books are available. We do not use any one published scheme to teach reading: instead, we believe that it is important to provide pupils with a wide range of reading books and texts from different genres and subject matter. This is so that we can provide the children at Irk Valley with the opportunity to have as many different reading experiences as possible.

Reading Schemes

At Irk Valley, we use a range of home reading book schemes. This is to ensure that our children experience a wider range of texts from a variety of authors, genres and styles.

We use the following schemes:

• Collins: Big Cat
• Oxford Reading Tree: Project X, Treetops and Floppy's Phonics

Home Reading

We encourage children to read at home for at least 10 minutes every day, and to get their reading record signed a minimum of 3 times per week. Each time a child reads, we expect that the adult listening to them adds a note to their reading record. When doing this, please include:

• The name of the book they are reading
• The page number they have read up to
• A comment about the child's reading. If the child is working on their fluency, please comment on this. If the child already reads the book fluently, please ask them questions to aid their understanding and comment on how well they have understood what they have read.

Please help to support your child's reading development by listening to them read as often as possible and signing their reading record to show their teachers how often they are reading at home. Thank you.