Yr R Reading Page

It all starts with a book…

Every book opens a door to another world, where will the next book take us?

The children in Year R read every day in school and every night at home. We really enjoy reading to ourselves and to adults, sharing books with our friends and listening to our teachers when they read to us!
Reading forms an important part of our day, every day, in Year R. We have whole class lessons to teach us the fundamentals of reading, as well as group guided reading and one to one reading with an adult.

We have some wonderful reading areas in our classroom. We have a reading garden in our indoor classroom and a reading den in the outdoor classroom where we love to look at books on our own, with our friends, teachers or the cuddly reading buddies. Every week, Henrietta the hedgehog (a book loving hedgehog) delivers a book for us to read and enjoy throughout the week. We enjoy re-reading the book so we can join in, we act it out in the small world tray, we learn new words and develop our vocabulary and share fiction and non-fiction books related to the text.

Bertie the Bee also loves collecting and finding new rhymes and poems in our Reading Garden. We enjoy re-reading and joining in with them, exploring any new vocabulary and changing the words to create our own new rhymes and poems.

One child a week brings in their favourite book and poem/rhyme to share with the class and we take advantage of our school and town library with regular visits to refresh our class library.

Children have a reading book that helps them with applying their phonic knowledge and this is changed through out the week. They are encouraged to read each book three times. Once to use their skills to decode the words, the second time is to develop the ability to read more words ‘at a glance’ and the third time is to increase their fluency.

The children also take a second book home which is a picture book that an adult can read to them. This may be fiction, non-fiction, poetry or one of the classes core texts. The choice lies with the child and they can change these as frequently as they wish.

We have regular sessions where we invite our parents or other special adults to come in and read with us. This is an amazing time which we really look forward to…and so do the adults! We also invite other classes to come and read to us. It’s a lovely experience to hear other children read to us. We are always in awe of the older children because we know that is what we are going to become in a couple of years.

And finally…we are already authors ourselves. We use a book to ‘hook’ our learning and create learning opportunities. Through our continuous provision our teacher provides lots of opportunities for us to practise our phonics, extend our vocabulary, be authors and illustrators, readers and actors.

Here is a selection of some of the books that we have used in Reception Class, for ‘Book as a Hook’:

Book as a hook!

We use a “book as a hook” to support our literacy lessons.  This means that our writing is inspired by, and linked to, a specific book.  We have  enjoyed many “books as a hook”.  Here is a selection of some we have enjoyed in the past:  
 
Supertato by Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet.
This book inspired us to create our own superheroes. We looked at character descriptions of Supertato and his evil nemesis Evil Pea.  We looked at other superheroes and wondered what our super power would be.
 
Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper
Pumpkin Soup is a wonderful tale that reminds us how to be a good friend.  We enjoyed looking at the autumnal colours and studied pumpkins in our art lessons.  We drew still life pumpkins, describing the colours and textures of their skins, then looked inside and wrote instructions on how to make soup.  We talked about how we could be great friends as we shared our home made soup.
 
Whatever Next! by Jill Murphy
As we looked at bonfire night we read Whatever Next!  A story about a bear who, in his imagination, flew to the moon in a homemade rocket.  We learned how to make our own rockets, writing instructions, and writing lists of what we would take with us on our journey to the moon.
 
Rama and Sita: The story of Diwali
We discovered all about Diwali using this colourful book.  We rewrote the story in our own words, saying who our favourite character was and why.  We explored colour and learned how to mix colours togother.
 
Kipper’s Birthday by Mick Inkpen
We enjoyed birthday fun with Kipper in his birthday book.  We explored different celebrations and rewrote his story.  We thought about how stories are made up with a beginning, middle and end.  We wrote invitations and lists for a party!
 
The Monster Machine by Nicola L. Robinson
We explored all things monsters using The Monster Machine.  We described at the setting of the book; wrote lists of what we needed to make a monster and described what our own monsters would look like.
 
That’s not my Monster by Fiona Watt
There are many That’s not my…books an we looked at a selection of them, understanding the features of these books.  We read That’s not my Monster which inspired us to write our own book.  We create our own monsters and used our character descriptions in our books.
 
We also love to use non fiction books to aid our curiosity and learning.  In our role play we can often be found other reading material such as magazines, brochures, recipe books and maps.
 
We also love to use our class bibles and bible story books as our hook and inspiration.  We just can’t stop reading!!!

YrR Core Texts

EYFS Book List

Best 100 Books

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