At Abbey Hulton Primary we’re excited to introduce the implementation of our new KS1 Reading Squads. We’ve been working hard to establish an effective guided reading intervention to promote accelerated progress in KS1, as Year 1 and Year 2 academic progress has been grossly impacted by the pandemic. Across the key stage we have 4 adults in addition to the class teachers in each year group, who will read with their group of children every day.

Each day has a different focus:

Day 1: vocabulary, tricky words, phonics alphabetic code and pre-read book talk

Day 2: fluency and expression within the text

Day 3: comprehension – practicing orally

Day 4: comprehension- written independently

Day 5: cold comprehension- children engage with a completely new text to apply their skills taught from this week, we also revisit the activities from day 1 to assess pupil progress over the week.

The squad begins in Year 1 from 10:45am – 11:15am and then transition to Year 2 from 11:30-12:00, every child is read with every day and has adult interaction daily for 30 minutes solely devoted to reading. The adult changes group weekly to come full circle with their original reading group on week 6 of the half term. For class teachers this will give an insight to progress in reading with every child after 5 weeks intervention. All adults involved have been trained to record accurate notes and instant feedback to the class teachers to ensure that teachers can plan high quality sessions and no learning time is lost for our children so that rapid progress can be made within these year groups.

As a school we still use our ‘One Education Reading Gems’ to ensure consistency across the year groups. In KS1 these have been adapted to a more child-friendly version- our reading pirates! Our slogan is for children to ‘Find the treasure hidden in the text!’.