Early Reading
Early Reading
At St. Paul’s, we want all our children to develop a lifelong love of reading because we know that it has a dramatic impact on their educational outcomes, wellbeing and social mobility and it is also a huge pleasure in itself. In order to do this, we are determined that all children will learn to read from the very start of their journey with us. The children are taught to use phonic knowledge as the route to decode words. Through practice, they build fluency in reading these words so that they can gain meaning from what they are reading. From this, they then gain pleasure, interest and enjoyment which motivates them to read more.
Reception
Reading in Reception begins through exposure to books with simple or no text, enabling children to develop early narrative skills, talk about pictures, and internalise story structure. Teachers read a wide range of high‑quality texts to children every day for enjoyment, language development, and comprehension.
Children also take home library books weekly to share with an adult, supporting vocabulary and oral comprehension. As soon as children begin learning phonemes through Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS), they are introduced to fully decodable books closely matched to the sounds they know. This begins from the first half term in September.
Daily Phonics Teaching (ELS)
Children in Reception receive:
- Daily ELS phonics lessons that follow the programme’s sequence with complete fidelity.
- Opportunities to practise phonics across continuous provision, reinforcing blending, segmenting, and grapheme recognition through play.
- Keep‑up sessions, delivered using ELS resources and routines, for any child needing additional practice.
Home Reading Books
Each week, children take home:
- A fully decodable ELS reading book
- Carefully matched to the exact phonemes and graphemes taught that week.
- Children may also take a blending practice book aligned with new sounds to reinforce fluency and accuracy.
- A sharing book
- A high‑quality picture book chosen for pleasure and enjoyment, to be shared at home to develop language, vocabulary, and comprehension.
- One sharing book to enjoy with family
Staff share a rich variety of stories, rhymes, poems, and non‑fiction texts daily. These sessions explicitly model:
- A love of reading
- Fluent expression and reading behaviours
- Story structure and vocabulary
- How decoding links to comprehension
Reception also take part in daily story time, singing, or poetry, supporting oral language, listening skills, and memory. Children are read with daily, using: ELS phonics workbooks, their decodable reading books and any other additional ELS-aligned texts.
Reading sessions focus on:
- Decoding accuracy
- Prosody (expression and phrasing)
- Comprehension through talk
At St Paul’s, we have a positive reading culture in school to promote a love for reading, which is a skill which underpins all learning. It is essential that our approach to teaching phonics and reading is accessible to all learners.
Key Stage 1
This model and lesson structure is carried across Year 1 and Year 2 (lesson 1 – background knowledge and decoding, lesson 2 – fluency and prosody, lesson 3 – comprehension) as the difficulty of the texts increase. After completing Floppy’s Phonics Phase 6, the children move onto Collins Big Cat banded books. By the end of year 2, they read gold, white and lime in line with the KS1 assessments and begin to record their comprehension tasks in line with KS2 Guided Reading structure and practice.
