Reading:

Introduction:
The ability to read effectively is an essential requirement if the child is to benefit fully from the educational process, to develop his/her potential and to participate appropriately as a citizen in society. Reading is also a crucial element in the child’s language learning.

Aims:
The teachers in St. Olaf’s aim to ensure that each child is given the opportunity to develop his/her literacy skills, thereby becoming an effective reader.

The context for Reading in St.Olaf’s
St. Olaf’s School will strive to be a Print Rich Environment with the regular use of job - charts, weather charts posters and displays of children’s writing to focus the child’s attention on the written word.

Policy:
Our policy for teaching reading will have three phases
1. Emergent Reading (Junior/ Senior Infants)
2. Middle ground 1st – 3rd.
3. Literature 4th – 6th

Strategies:
Our approach to reading in these phases will be based on a strong grounding in general language competence (cf Oral Language).
We consider basic sight vocabulary to be an important element of the language base that the child needs before beginning a structured reading programme. It will be acquired from a number of sources, such as:
· Language experience material
· Large format books
· Environmental print
· Contextual flash cards
·
Phonological and phonemic awareness will play a central role in giving the children word identification strategies. Particular emphasis will be put on syllabification and onset and rime (cf Phonological programme)

The development of comprehension skills will be an important strategy used by our teachers. The following skills will be given priority

· Recall/retell
· Inference
· Prediction
· Correlation
· Understanding
· Evaluation
· Analysis
· Confirmation
· Deduction
· Summarisation

Choosing suitable reading schemes will be of prime importance as will be the choice of class novel. (cf Teachers lists)
The integrative nature of reading will be helped by the choice of textbooks in the other curricular areas.
Our school already has a well-developed and well-stocked library, which is run by a group of interested parents. Each class has a specified library half an hour per week, which allows the children, the teachers and the parents to truly feel part of the reading community of the school. The teachers choose a range of books-fiction, non-fiction, poetry in twice yearly visits to Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Library service. Each classroom also has its own library and the children use this for supplementary reading activities.

Parental Involment:
As already stated the parents of St. Olaf’s are already involved in the Reading life of the school providing an extremely efficient library service. At the emergent reading phase they are involved with the reading card system and with the “ Forward Together” scheme which is based on the “MIST” Screening Test. Parents are also involved with reading activities presented in the Class Diary on a daily basis

Assessment:
Continuous assessment of children’s progress in reading will be an important part of our school policy on reading. This will be done at phase 1 and phase 2 by teacher observation and by a reading card system. All classes will be assessed on a yearly basis using the MIST test for emergent readers and the Drumcondra Reading Test. for all other classes. Children who display weakness will have diagnostic testing carried out by the learning support teacher (cf School Policy on Learning Support) The following is a class by class list of objectives that children will, in so far as possible be enabled to obtain.