Reading at Brooklands

At Brooklands Primary School, we believe that reading is essential for children as it enhances language skills, cognitive development, creativity, and emotional intelligence while also improving academic performance and fostering a lifelong love for learning.  It unlocks the rest of the curriculum! Reading also strengthens parent-child bonds and helps children understand diverse perspectives, setting them up for success in life.  Through teaching a rich curriculum, we continuously expose our children to a broad range of high-quality texts. Here at Brooklands, we create lifelong readers, who enjoy reading and choose to read.

Our Reading Approach 

Our children begin their journey with a phonics and early reading program.  Our systematic, synthetic phonics programme – No Nonsense Phonics, teaches our youngest children the alphabetic code and gives them the skills to decode, encode and blend to read words. It also focuses on reading with fluency and develop an understanding of what they are reading.  

Alongside phonics, in the EYFS, the children take part in ‘Talk Through Stories’.  This focuses on developing our children’s understanding of stories and enables them to develop a rich language and extended vocabulary.  Throughout the week, the children get to know different stories really well; thinking about the plot, the characters, their actions and motives.

In year 1, alongside phonics, the children have focused reading lessons following the Launchpad programme.  Launchpad Reading enables our children to work on a decodable book/text over a series of lessons. They learn to read the words with confidence and then how to read them fluently. As their confidence grows, they then work with the teacher to look a little bit closer at the text, to truly understand what is happening in it.  The approach is built around enabling children to become successful readers and learn from an expert reader. Children do this through a structured approach and regular practice with a decodable reading book. 

Once our children have exited our phonics programme and have a secure foundation in the alphabetic code, they move on to developing fluency, stamina and other reading skills.  Regular whole-class reading sessions support our children to learn a broad range of new, challenging vocabulary, develop fluency, accuracy and automaticity; becoming skilled readers and read with meaning and enjoyment. All children from year 2 to year 6 engage in our whole-class reading lessons. We take an approach to whole-class reading that is grounded in evidence and research.

The Reading Sequence

We strongly promote reading for pleasure and offer children the opportunities to share books and talk about what they have read. We have close links with our local library and regular visits there ensure our children have the opportunity to choose and peruse the books they enjoy reading. Each class has a designated story time each day, and the children have input into which stories are shared.  We have a two book approach for home reading.  One book is matched to their secure GPC knowledge and another is a self-chosen library book that they can share with their families. 

Writing at Brooklands

At Brooklands, we teach writing daily. We look for creative ways to engage our writers, and we closely link all our writing to other areas of the curriculum to make it purposeful and meaningful for our children.

Our children receive a daily English lesson, where writing is taught. We follow a three-week structure to our writing units, across the school.

We use high quality texts to bring the units to life. The units are carefully planned across both the year group and the school. This is to ensure that our children can build upon and further develop their previous learning, enabling them to leave our school being able to craft a variety of different pieces. At the end of each unit, the children’s work is displayed on our writing wall. This allows the children to see their work being published, as well as see the progression of writing throughout school.

We create opportunities to write across other areas of the curriculum, as this allows the children to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of other areas of the curriculum.