Reading at Hayes

At Hayes we are passionate about reading and we are keen to develop all children into successful readers. We understand the importance of the early stages of reading and how fluency, vocabulary acquisition, comprehension and a love of reading are intertwined to create successful readers.  

The reading journey of a child at Hayes Primary School:

EYFS and Key Stage 1

• Phonics and early reading is taught through the Read Write Inc. scheme of work. It helps to develop children's speaking and listening, reading and writing skills. 
• Once the children have started to blend and read some words, they will take home books to read.
• When a child has completed the RWI scheme, and are therefore fluent readers, they will receive a daily whole-class reading session instead of a phonics lessons to develop their comprehension skills with more targeted questions.  At this time, they will become a free reader, meaning that they can choose their reading books more independently.

Key Stage 2

• In Key Stage 2, the children are taught reading through a daily whole-class approach. Lessons are structured to ensure that children are first fluent in the text being taught (one per week) and understand the key vocabulary. After this, comprehension skills such as inference and retrieval are taught and practised through a variety of questions as well debates, discussions and open-ended questions to cultivate a love of reading.
• Children in Key Stage 2 also read books from the Quality Text Scheme (QTS). This offers a range of genres and supplements the children’s free reader choices to ensure they are exposed to a both a range of texts and also age-appropriate vocabulary. The children decide which QTS books they would like to read and are monitored closely by teachers to ensure they are reading books that are the appropriate level from them in terms of fluency and comprehension.