Reading at home with your child is the most powerful thing a parent can do to support them at school. 

By reading to and with your child, you will;

• increase vocabulary by reading more difficult books

• improve comprehension by being able to ask questions

• make your child more likely to enjoy literature later in life, because of the modelling by parents

• be spending precious time with your child

At Cottage Grove Primary School we aim for all our pupils to become fluent, confident readers who want to read for pleasure and through the skill of reading become independent life-long learners.

In order to achieve this, we teach early reading through Read Write Inc Phonics (RWI) developed by Ruth Miskin. RWI provides a structured, systematic approach to teaching phonics from Nursery into Reception and KS1, where all pupils learn to become fluent readers, confident speakers and willing writers. All pupils are assessed regularly and work with other pupils at the same level. In Nursery and Reception, they are introduced to initial sounds before learning how to blend these sounds to read words using Fred Talk and sound blending. They then begin to read simple ditties and simple sentences before moving onto more complex sounds and books appropriate to their reading level as they move into Year 1 and 2. 

Once children are able to successfully read simple words and ditties, pupils will bring home phonetically decodable books at an appropriate level to read to you and further practise their phonics. 

For KS2, we follow Destination Reader. Destination Reader is a reading programme used in primary schools to develop students’ reading comprehension skills through structured, daily lessons. It combines whole-class reading, partner discussion, and strategies like predicting, questioning, and summarising to foster deeper understanding and a love of reading.