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.