At Pioneer School we promote the love of reading and the love of learning to read by providing a multi-sensory experience built around our students’ interests. We support our students by helping them to build on the core foundations of reading:

• Understanding

• Communication

• Listening and attention

• Engagement and enjoyment

A wide range of strategies are used in order to best meet the needs of our students, many of whom have difficulty with auditory or visual processing, long and short memory or other difficulties which are prerequisites to proficient reading.

Some of the things we do in school include reading areas in every classroom, sensory stories, audio stories, daily reading for pleasure, using ICT to create our own stories, visits to local libraries, travelling librarians and puppets. 

Texts have been carefully planned in school to ensure we foster a love of reading from a wide range, including stories, non-fiction texts, poems and a host of other reading materials. 

Developing students’ pre-reading skills is an essential part of the literacy curriculum. Pre-reading skills focus on teaching children to tune into sounds, remembering them and gradually learning to name them. This is done in lots of different ways for example by reading and reciting nursery rhymes and playing sound-based games.  

We will now be providing sensory story bags to take home and share with your children. Each bag is based upon a children’s story and contains the story, props to be used alongside telling the story and a prompt sheet to show when each prop should be used.

Please  see our sensory story library below.   

When you receive your story bag, we would recommend that you read the story yourself initially and go through the props to ensure you know what props are used at what point during the story. There is a document included which lists which props to use at each stage of the story.

The story bag should be returned, complete with all props, cleaned where appropriate, by the date shown on the loan form. If any props are lost or damaged, please do let us know when you return it so that we can ensure they are replaced before the next child uses it. There is no charge for taking the stories, so please do try to return everything, complete and undamaged so that we can continue to provide these resources for the benefit of all of our students.

Most importantly, have fun, enjoy the stories together. Maybe you could try creating your own sensory stories. 

Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.