Reading Curriculum

At Oxhill Nursery School, we believe developing a love of reading and understanding the key skills involved in sharing a range of different kinds of books, are of vital importance for all our young children. Reading is the greatest gift we can give to a child. It is the key to developing the vocabulary needed to communicate effectively and is crucial to becoming an independent learner. Building a reading culture is our fundamental aim so that every child within our school begins their journey to becoming a fluent reader.

Aims:

Through teaching reading, we aim to:

Promote and encourage a lifelong love of reading for pleasure.
Read aloud stories, poems, rhymes and non-fiction to children regularly, to encourage the love of reading.
Begin to teach children a variety of reading strategies including using picture clues.
Develop children’s vocabulary.
Use cross-curricular links so that reading is at the heart of learning.
Involve parents in improving their child’s reading through using the school library including story sacks and puppet bags.
Promote a good model of reading with expression, enjoyment and understanding, through daily story time and access to books in an inviting reading area and across the areas of provision.
We aim that all children have the opportunity to have a high-quality text read to them every day in school. This is through the schools ‘Core Books’ which adults have access to in every group and parents may access in the library

Dialogic reading

We have introduced Dialogic Reading across our nursery school. This is an interactive shared reading practice where the adult and child engage in a dialogue around our core texts. Each text is read during adult led sessions over the course of 1 or 2 weeks and are then available to the children in the continuous and enhanced provision all year. It aims to enhance the child’s language and literacy skills by encouraging active participation. The adult prompts the child with questions about the story, character or illustration, expanding on their responses, and encouraging them to join in with the repeated refrains, copy and repeat identified vocabulary and to retell parts of the story.

This technique is structured around the PEER sequence:

Prompt the child to say something about the book. (see CROWD prompts below)

Evaluate the child’s response by rephrasing and adding information, if needed.

Expand on the child’s response.

Repeat the prompt to ensure the child has learned from the expansion.

Additionally, dialogic reading employs the CROWD prompts to stimulate discussion:

Completion – prompts (e.g., “The dog is jumping over the…”).

Recall – prompts (e.g., “What happened to the dog in the story?”).

Open-ended – prompts (e.g., “What do you think will happen next?”).

Wh – prompts (e.g., “What is the dog doing?”).

Distancing – prompts (e.g., “Do you remember when we saw a dog like this?”).

This method transforms the child from a passive listener to an active storyteller, boosting their vocabulary, comprehension, and narrative skills.

Our Core Books, Songs and Rhymes

Teaching and Learning:

The focus is developing children’s language and communication skills through the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum. Early matching, categorising and sorting activities within the Nursery environment are used to develop visual discrimination skills needed for early reading.
Books are shared daily in a small group; print has a high profile in the environment; and books will be shared ‘over and over’.
Books are shared with the children daily and children are motivated to look at and talk about story and information books in their child initiated play by utilising books in all areas of the provision.
Each child will have access to the school library books to share at home with their families, over and over again and we have a community library at the school entrance that families can borrow books from.

Vocabulary teaching will be planned where possible. Younger children will focus upon the acquisition of action words (verbs) to develop their understanding. Describing words (adjectives) will be introduced with object words (nouns) to encourage children to systematically develop their vocabulary to build sentences.

Children will participate in activities that develop their phonological awareness focusing upon Phase one of Letters and Sounds.

Children will:

Develop speaking and listening skills through role-play and adult intervention.
Be exposed to, and begin to develop an awareness of, different sounds.
Begin to develop an awareness of rhythm, rhyme and alliteration.
Be provided with further support as necessary to ensure pupils who fall behind catch up quickly.
Be provided with reading opportunities during continuous provision.

Equal Opportunities:

Children with SEND will work towards the same objectives with support and appropriate differentiation. All children, including the SEND and Disadvantaged, will be encouraged to make good progress in reading, regardless of race or gender. A ‘can-do’ approach will be promoted by all adults. Our nursery books will reflect differences and encourage discussions about them.