At Watling Primary School, reading is at the heart of everything we do. We are passionate about giving every child the strongest possible start to their reading journey, because we learn to read so that we can read to learn.
We believe that every child can become a confident and fluent reader and writer, regardless of their starting point or additional needs. We teach early reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, a systematic synthetic phonics programme which provides a consistent and carefully sequenced approach.
We prioritise securing the foundations of reading for every child. Regular assessment helps us quickly identify children who need additional support, enabling us to provide targeted teaching and practice so that they can develop the knowledge, confidence and fluency they need to succeed.
Alongside phonics, we celebrate a love of reading throughout our school. Children enjoy high-quality texts, engaging reading materials and regular opportunities to hear adults read aloud within writing and reading lessons and trips to the library. Through books, we broaden children’s vocabulary, knowledge, imagination, and understanding of the world.
We love finding exciting ways to bring reading to life! Throughout the year, children enjoy special events including World Book Day, where we celebrate our favourite books, authors and characters, and our Readathon, which creates a real excitement around reading for pleasure. Our school library is at the heart of our reading culture, giving children opportunities to explore high-quality books, discover new authors, and develop their own reading interests.
At Watling Primary School, we are proud to be growing confident, enthusiastic and lifelong readers.
Our Phonics and Early Reading Statement contains further information about our teaching approach.
Library
Our wonderful school library is used by all children every week and is one of our favourite spaces in school.
Visits to the library provide opportunities to promote our love of reading and explore and learn more about our individual interests. For this reason, we actively involve our children in deciding which books we purchase for our library.
Our feature tree showcases our library theme of the week and is used as a focal point for the teaching that takes place in each session. We use it to introduce and develop important aspects of reading such as the classification of different genres of books, recognition of leading authors and illustrators and exploration of personal reading preferences.
