READING
Bromley Beacon Academy places great importance on reading since it is a vital skill for all students to learn. Our Reading curriculum is designed to ensure all students know that reading is an open door to all other learning opportunities. They understand that reading frequently makes them a good reader, and being a good reader expands their world. Our students will embrace their own individual reading journey and will celebrate their reading milestones as they develop new strategies, learn new words, explore different genres, discover unknown authors, experience unfamiliar settings and unpick hidden meanings. By continually reflecting on their own reading journey, our children will not only be able to read, but most importantly, will want to read.
We do this through:
- Developing children’s competence in both dimensions of reading: word reading and comprehension.
- Prioritising reading for all students; giving them the knowledge and skills to decode, learn and recognise a growing bank of words.
- Ensuring Quality First Teaching, where every child is treated as an individual, and additional support is put in place to make sure all children can ‘keep up’.
- Fostering an appreciation and love of reading for all of our children.
- Placing books, texts and images at the heart of daily school life.
- Ensuring all of our children transition to their next educational setting as enthusiastic, fluent and confident readers.
A variety of rewards and incentives are used to encourage and motivate students to read for pleasure.
Phonics
At Bromley Beacon Academy, we follow the Letters and Sounds scheme to teach phonics apart from Green Class who follow the Jolly Phonics scheme. The aim is to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonetic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills to children with the aim of them becoming fluent readers. Phonics sessions are taught throughout KS1 and KS2 and then consolidated within specific English ability groups in KS3. Children will have a 15-20 minute phonics session at least 4 times a week at the beginning of the day.
The phonic sessions will include a mixture of written work and interactive games during which the children will be recognising, learning and identifying sounds, blending sounds to make words and practicing writing them through dictation of words and sentences.
For more information on this scheme click on the link https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/what-is-letters-and-sounds/ or https://www.jollylearning.co.uk/jolly-phonics/
Guided Reading
At Bromley Beacon Academy, we use a programme called Myon to support teaching reading through guided reading sessions. This is a programme that allows the students to have access to over 1000 books on line. The students are grouped according to their reading age and work daily for 20 minutes at least four times a week with their teacher. During this session, the students read together, explore books together and secure an understanding of comprehension, inference and deduction skills that support their fluency in reading.
Assessment
Bromley Beacon Academy assesses all students upon entry to establish baseline data in reading comprehension, single word reading and single word spelling. All data is reported in a standardised score format enabling students to be compared to their peers nationally. Students with a standardised score of less than 90 are tested twice per year.
This data is then used to inform classroom planning and identify those students who would benefit from further intervention. Dependent upon their level of need, this may be classroom-based within a small-group or withdrawal from class to take part in a bespoke small-group or 1:1 programme. This work aims to overcome barriers to learning, build resilience and confidence and increase self-esteem.
If you require further information please do not hesitate to contact: Miss Amantha Canagasingham This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
