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Year 2 Reading Workshop

How we teach reading and how you can support your child.

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Welcome!

We hope to provide you with as much information as we can so that you have a good understanding of how we teach reading and how you can support your child with their reading at home.

Thank you,

The Year 2 Team ☺

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Why is reading important?

Pupils who have developed good reading skills by the middle of primary school find it easier to access other parts of the curriculum, and enjoy it more. (DfE, 2016)
Reading for pleasure is important for children's cognitive development and is one of the most powerful factors in life achievement. (Sullivan & Brown, 2013)
Good literacy at an early age improves academic achievement and this leads to greater opportunities of all kinds in adulthood. (School Readers, 2022)
Good literacy has been linked to better skilled and a more flexible workforce, better mental health and higher participation within communities (National Literacy Trust, 2008)

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What makes a skilled reader?

Cara-At Yenton we understand that there are 2 parts to reading, based on Scarborough’s Reading rope, and we use this to teach reading. The 2 parts are language comprehension and word recognition. Each of these has several smaller strands. Woven together, these strands become the rope that represents complete skilled reading. All the components are interconnected and interdependent.

The lower section of Scarborough’s Reading Rope focuses on word recognition skills. These are the skills we tend to think of most when we talk about teaching kids how to read. Imagine your child sounding out the letters on a page or putting together phonics sounds and syllables. These are the basics of word recognition.

(We have phonological awareness which is understanding that words are made up of sounds.

Decoding which is sounding out the words letter by letter. It includes things like phonics, letter blends, silent letters, and more. Children proficient at decoding can sound out all the words they see on a page, even if they don’t know what the words mean.

Sight recognition which is when some words are used so frequently that we to teach children to recognize them on sight.)

The upper section of Scarborough’s Reading Rope focuses on language comprehension. Word recognition on its own doesn’t create fluent readers. If children don’t know what the words themselves mean, they’re not really reading. Furthermore, understanding the meaning of words on their own isn’t really useful. Fluent readers understand the text they’re reading as a whole, drawing meaningful conclusions and finding important takeaways.

(In language comprehension there is Background knowledge which is what the child already knows.

Vocabulary which is the variety of words children know and understand the meaning of.

Language Structure looks at the order of words and the meaning of the text. English has a lot of rules for the patterns and order of words, and how words and phrases combine to create meaning and how an author’s word choice affects that meaning.

Verbal Reasoning which is understanding when and how words are being figurative and literal. It includes things like metaphors, analogies, idioms, and figurative language.

Literacy Knowledge. Children gain literacy knowledge by exposure to a wide array of genres and styles. Generally speaking, the more types of reading a child encounters, the more advanced their literacy knowledge becomes.)

Combined they make skilled reading, which is the fluent execution and comprehension of word recognition and text recognition. If just one strand is weak, it affects the rope (and therefore the reader) as a whole. So if your child is struggling with their reading, hopefully this model can help you to understand what is involved in reading and being a skilled reader.

There’s a lot that goes into reading and this is why we use a variety of methods in the classroom when it comes to teaching reading.

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How we teach reading at Yenton

Phonics

1:1 Reading

Story Time

Shared Reading

Guided Reading

English Lessons

Reading for Pleasure

Jade-We teach reading with a variety of teaching approaches and strategies combining to develop children’s fluency, confidence and enjoyment in

reading.

These are:

Shared Reading

Shared Reading is a whole-class teaching strategy designed to improve children’s knowledge and understanding of how to comprehend texts.
As teachers, we model and share the thought process involved in constructing a mental model (a personal, internal representation) of a text.

Guided Reading

Guided Reading is a group-based teaching strategy designed to complement whole-class shared reading and further improve children’s knowledge and understanding of how to comprehend texts.
Focused discussion is used as a key strategy to support children’s growing understanding of comprehension and to improve their depth of understanding of a text.

Phonics

Children are taught to read by connecting sounds (phonemes) and the symbols that they represent (grapheme/s). They learn to form each grapheme, along with saying and reading the new sound. They are then taught how to blend these sounds into words, including those with alternative graphemes, and how to segment these words to support their spelling.

1:1 reading

Out TAs and volunteers take children to read with 1:1, to support them on an individual basis, according to what they children need.

Story time

Storytime helps the children to develop a wider range of vocabulary that they may not currently have the ability to access. It also means that the children can concentrate on what is happening in the story and become engrossed and interested in the characters. They can listen to the story without interruption. It also helps with creative writing and developing a love for reading.

English Lessons

We cover a variety of text types in English to that link to the books we are looking at in Shared reading. This supports comprehension of the text and helps with the creative aspect of their writing.

Reading for Pleasure

Potentially the most important way we teach reading is through reading for pleasure. We will come onto this more in depth later.

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How texts are chosen for Shared Reading

The text in English is based on the book from Shared Reading
Linked to the wider curriculum topics
High quality texts from a variety of authors
Range of genres
Balance of contemporary and classic
Supported with age related books

Jade- The books we choose in Shared Reading are the books that the texts we use in English are based on. Currently we are reading the Snail and the Whale in Shared Reading, whilst in English we are learning how to write a diary entry from the perspective of the Snail from the Snail and the whale. The books are matched to the age-appropriate interest level for the majority of the children and aligned with age-related expectations. They are linked to the wider curriculum topics where possible so that the children have a good background knowledge and contextual understanding of the text. We select high quality texts from a variety of authors from different cultural backgrounds and ensure there are a range of genres. We also want to ensure that we have a balance of contemporary and classic texts. The link to the writing text we are learning in English so we can support pupils learning.

As well as the books that link to our English text, we also use age related texts in order to support children with their vocabulary development and that include content that the children can relate to. We hope to develop their fluency so they are able to comprehend and understand what they have read by having books at the reading level for year 2 age-related expectations.

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Reading Dogs

The totally pawsome gang is a group of clever canines who each help with one of the reading content domains.

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Victor Vocabulary

Vocabulary Victor helps with content domain 1a:

This means that he helps in thinking about the words the author uses.
He helps to work out what words mean, find words the author has used or giving another word which means the same as one of the author’s choices.

Draw on knowledge of vocabulary to understand texts.

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Rex Retriever

Rex Retriever helps with content domain 1b:

This means that he helps to answer questions by finding the answer in the text.
He might ask what the characters are called, what they do, what the name of the chapter is or what has been learned about a particular topic.

Identify/explain key aspects of fiction and non-fiction texts, such as characters, events, titles and information.

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Sequencing Suki

Sequencing Suki helps with content domain 1c:

This means that she helps to think about the order things happen in.
She might ask about putting different events from the text into the order they happened, what happened first or last or to match events to the day or time they happened.

Identify and explain the sequence of events in texts.

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Inference Iggy

Inference Iggy helps with content domain 1d:

This means that he helps hunt for clues in the text.
These clues help to work out how someone is feeling, why somebody did something or why something is happening.
The two types of question that Inference Iggy likes to ask most are: ‘why?’ and ‘how do you know?’

Make inferences from the text.

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Predicting Pip

Predicting Pip helps with content domain 1e:

This means that she helps see into the future.
She helps to work out what might happen next based on what has already been read and what is known about that type of text.

Predict what might happen on the basis of what has been read so far.

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Reading Dog Targets

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How we teach a Shared Reading Lesson

Jade-In shared reading we focus on an extract from the text for 1 week. This allows pupils to focus on their comprehension as they are confident in reading the text, as it is the same extract throughout the week. It also shows the pupils that they can use all of their skills in any text they are given, not just at specific parts.

We start the lesson by reading the extract of the text. Each child has a copy of the text that they read from and use to apply the skills they are learning. In this part we focus on fluency and reading with expression. Teachers model reading to start and then pupils take over. This may be through partner reading, selecting children to continue reading to the class or reading as a whole class. Reading with expression is really important here, as it shows that the pupils understand what they have read as well (linking back to the reading rope). Model reading with expression here?

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Reading for Pleasure

Reading for pleasure has many non-literacy benefits and can increase empathy, improve relationships with others and improve wellbeing throughout life (The Reading Agency, 2015)
Reading increases a person’s understanding of their own identity, improves empathy and gives them an insight into the world view of others (The Reading Agency, 2015)
Students who read for pleasure make significantly more progress in vocabulary, spelling and maths than children who read very little (Sullivan & Brown, 2013).

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How you can support at home

Encouraging your children to read at home for pleasure
Listening to your children read aloud and asking questions about what they have read
Filling in their Reading Record Book with any books they have read
Reading to your child so they can concentrate on the story
Going to the library to choose books they are interested in

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“One of the greatest gifts adults can give is to read to children.”�

Carl Sagan