Reading

At Underwood West Academy, we want our children to become succussful lifelong learners and recognise that reading lies at the heart of this. We aim to instil a love of reading where children read for enjoyment. We aim for children to become independent readers who read with fluency, prosody and accuracy.

Our approach to reading not only enables children to read a variety of genres and to read books from different cultures and times, but enhances their love of reading. By providing a text rich environment and using quality texts as a stimulus to lessons, children are given opportunities to practice their reading skills, extend their vocabulary, widen their experiences, develop their imaginations and to read for pleasure.

Teachers instil a love of reading through the use of engaging reading areas in every classroom, quality texts across the curriculum and daily love of reading sessions underpin our rich reading curriculum.

Early reading is taught through our systematic Monster Phonics scheme alongside exposure to high quality texts that ensure our children encounter rich and varied vocabulary.

The highly engaging Monster Phonics decodable books which are matched to the sounds the children have been learning are used in early reading.

Monster Phonics uses colour to help children learn the link between sound and spelling. This enables children to practise independent reading with books that are matched to their phonics knowledge which ultimately develops their fluency and confidence in reading.

See the link below to read an example of one of our decodable books

Monster Phonics - Free ebooks

Take One Book

To support our drive for all children to master reading we use the Take One Book resource as the foundations of our reading curriculum in Years 1-6.

Our reading curriculum enables us to teach reading strategies and behaviours that can be applied to a range of text types and genres. Children are taught to relate texts to themselves, other books and the wider world through the use of dialogic talk.