Reading at Carcroft

16th August 2023Admin Carcroft

We have aligned our teaching of reading with Jane Considine’s ‘Hooked on Books’ approach.

During the week, children take part in ‘Book Talk’ a whole class guided reading session.

In those ‘Book Talk’ sessions you will find our children reading by themselves, reading with a partner, reading as a whole class or listening to the class teacher model reading.

Children use the ‘Reading Rainbow’ to read and respond to texts through different lenses within 3 different zones of reading:

The Fantastics,
The Stylistics
The Analytics.
Book Talk is key to developing oracy skills. Children collaborate in groups using sentence stems and high utility words to develop a Book Talk response.

Children also complete comprehension tasks when working independently.

Ph-o-n-i-c-s w-i-th F-r-e-d

23rd March 2026Natasha Holdsworth

Unfortunately the English language is very tricky to learn. However, with the help of Fred, our children absolutely love giving it their all to be the best readers they can be! We use ‘Fred talk’ to decode words and then blend them together, we then are able to get quicker and become speedy readers. Alongside working hard to read the words, these children work even harder to spell them in sentences, remembering the fundamentals like capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. Not forgetting the beautiful handwriting! I am beyond proud of how hard the children work during their Read Write Inc lessons 🐸

Sharing Stories in Crew Ramsay 📚

11th March 2026Samantha Taylor

Today, Harlow, Hunter and Rose did a fantastic job reading stories out loud to their crew. Each of them chose a story they were excited about and took turns sharing it with everyone.

Harlow read with great confidence and expression, helping to bring the story to life for the listeners. Hunter did a brilliant job reading clearly and taking his time with tricky words so the story flowed nicely. Rose also read beautifully, using a strong, clear voice and showing great focus as she shared her story.

It was wonderful to see them all being brave and proud to read in front of their crew. Everyone listened carefully and enjoyed the different stories that were shared.

Well done, Harlow, Hunter and Rose – you were fantastic storytellers today! 🌟

Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover! Crew White Celebrates World Book Day

5th March 2026Charlotte Newman

Today, Crew White celebrated World Book Day with a fun book discovery activity designed to spark curiosity about reading. Students began by silently exploring eight different books placed around the room, judging their first impressions based on the covers. After discussing what caught their attention, students read a selection of blurbs, noted interesting details and questions on post-its, and reconsidered their choices. To finish, we held a lively Book Tournament, where the eight books competed in a class vote until one Crew White Champion Book was crowned — which we’ll now begin reading together in class.

Text Marking in Reading

8th October 2025Charlotte Newman

Today Crew McLoughlin have been working extra hard on their text marking in reading. While using their highlighters and pencils, they identified key ideas, annotated tricky words and added extra detail to show their understanding. Everyone showed great focus and teamwork, discussing their ideas and supporting one another. Well done, Crew McLoughlin – your reading skills are getting stronger every day!

Confidence is key!

12th September 2025Laura Hamill

Today in our reading lesson, we worked really hard as a crew and showed just how confident we have become at discussing the texts we read. We had in-depth discussions about our text and made some great links to our expedition topic. Mrs. Rankin was incredibly impressed with our ideas and opinions, and we were proud of how well we used our retrieval skills to answer questions. We are really growing as readers and enjoying our non-fiction texts along the way!

Demonstration Comprehension

1st July 2025Laura Hamill

Today, our crew worked hard in their demonstration comprehension lesson. We focused on the next chapter of our class text, Dark Flood, and tested our fluency by aiming to read 185 words in one minute, in line with the Year 6 expected standard. Following this, we worked with Miss as she modelled how to accurately answer a comprehension question, thinking about the best strategies that we could use. We focused on questions that had arisen as a problem for us based on our recent assessments. Once we’d done this, we then worked in pairs to attempt to answer some of our own questions, before coming back together as a crew to check if we all agreed on the answers.

A-m-a-z-i-ng Ph-o-n-i-c-s

26th March 2025Natasha Holdsworth

I would just like to praise these children for their continued progression when learning their sounds. Some even started Year 1 still learning Set 1 sounds and are now nearly at the end of their Set 3 sounds! Their love for learning really does shine through and we are so proud of you! Keep up the great work. Fred the Frog is so impressed!

World Book Day

7th March 2025Ruth Shields

It was fantastic to see so many children dressed up for World Book Day. We even had a dinosaur loose in the classroom.

In crew, we checked in by telling the crew which character they’d come as.

After break, we read with Crew Robson which was such a lovely time. It was lovely hearing the children read to younger children but also to hear them being confident enough to read to older children. And of course this was even better with a biscuit.

Well done to the effort and creativity that went into the paper plate challenge. Unfortunately we couldn’t give everyone a prize but well done to Lily-Ann and Emily.