Reading
Our reading commitment and ambitions
Queen's Croft High School is determined that every student will learn to read, regardless of their background, needs or abilities. This is because students who can read are overwhelmingly more likely to access the wider curriculum, succeed at school, achieve appropriate qualifications, and subsequently enjoy a fulfilling and rewarding life.
Through our schools mission and vision of ‘Inspiring G R E A T ness’, the R in G R E A T stands for READINESS. To ensure that we successfully support our students to be READY for their next stage of education, training and/or employment, we aim to ensure that pupils can read fluently and comprehend. Reading therefore plays a key priority within the school’s curriculum. We have dedicated and structured times each day for the teaching of reading and developing a love of reading.
Teaching reading
Following a review of the school’s curriculum the school are in a transition period of moving over to Rocket Phonics. Where appropriate to students individual needs and stage of learning, phonics is taught daily to consolidate and build on students’ knowledge. Rocket Phonics is combined with pre-phonics activities, comprehension and spelling & grammar sessions to ensure that all students can read, comprehend and explore literature.
Within phonics lessons students learn letter sounds, phoneme-grapheme correspondence, letter formation, segmenting, and blending. Throughout the programme students will learn the English Alphabetic Code, the 44 sounds (phonemes) and 150+ written representations (graphemes) of these sounds.
Rocket phonics is a systematic synthetic phonics programme which uses a combination of printed and digital resources; alongside big books, which consist of language rich stories that target letter sounds. Students can access a range of decodable reading books which are closely aligned to the phonics programme. Rocket phonics has a clear and structured progression of sounds and works at an adaptable pace which enables us to personalise learning.
Leaders have chosen Rocket Phonics as our approach because the programme has:
- a steady pace that is most appropriate for our student’s needs.
- a clear structure which supports teachers’ delivery and students learning routines.
- straightforward clarity for staff, students, and parents/carers
- engaging aesthetics which best suits our students needs
Please visit the website below to find out more about Rocket Phonics:
Developing a love of reading
As part of the broader reading curriculum, students will also engage in daily ‘love of reading’ sessions. This is where students will have access to high-quality, exciting texts, both fiction and non-fiction, which are linked to the wider curriculum. Students will have regular opportunities to listen to, explore and share a range of text’s with adults and peers. The breadth and depth of texts include stories, poems, rhymes and non-fiction, to develop students’ vocabulary, language comprehension and love of reading.
