At Stoke High School, the reading support we provide is integrated throughout the whole school day. It begins at the start of the day in form time where 3 times a week we provide literacy-focused sessions. These include modelled reading, the teaching of common prefixes, suffixes, and root words as well as teaching students about the wider world through our ‘Register and Read’ programme.
Support for reading continues in all lessons using various school-wide strategies. These include approaches such as reciprocal reading, encouraging fluency strategies, explicitly teaching vocabulary, and skimming and scanning. Our teachers are trained literacy experts, and this support is included in every lesson.
At home, we encourage you to read with your child for around 20 minutes a night. This will not only improve their literacy level and give them a chance to practice reading aloud, but also allows them to enjoy reading with you.
Triannual school-wide testing ensures we are kept up to date with our students reading progress. This helps us to select students who may require extra support with literacy. One way we support these students is by providing access to Reading Pro. This is a great online resource for struggling readings and can be accessed from home too. We use Reading Pro in school interventions with selected students as well as offering them our ‘Mastery Literacy’ or our ‘Fresh Start’ program which students complete with trained staff members.
Useful website:
10 top tips for parents to support children to read – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)