Reading

Reading

‘After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.’ Philip Pullman Author

Intent

• We recognise that being able to read well is a key life skill for children, whatever their background
• We believe that every child can learn to read with the right teaching and support
• We place reading and books at the centre of the curriculum
• We acknowledge that not all children will have had the opportunity to develop a love of reading at home, so this is taught and encouraged at school – just like any other area of the curriculum
• We aim to instil a love of reading for pleasure and a good knowledge of a range of authors, poets and illustrators.

Implementation

• We build time for all children to read independently, read aloud and be read to during the school day
• We have developed a coherent whole-school strategy for promoting reading for pleasure
• We spend money and time to support reading, including buying books and developing the school environment to support reading
• We believe that every teacher should be an advocate for reading
• We devote time to training staff, so they are equipped to support children’s enjoyment of reading
• We involve parents to ensure the culture of reading that the school has developed extends into the home.
• We do this by giving children access to high quality texts from a wide range of genres and we have a well-stocked age-related selection of books in both libraries as well as specially chosen books for each class.
• We have mapped our reading texts across the Key Stages to ensure that children have access to genres increasing their familiarity with a wide range of books, including myths, legends and traditional stories, modern fiction, fiction from our literary heritage, non-fiction, books from other cultures, diaries, poetry, thought-provoking dilemma texts and many more.
• Children are able to use these different genres to inform their own reading preferences and include features of the texts in their own writing.
• The books planned across the Key Stages offer challenge and inspiration for all children, providing them with new, exciting authors, different writing styles and vocabulary the children may not be familiar with already.
• We invite parents to reading workshops, discuss reading at parents’ evenings and prioritise reading as homework.
• We celebrate reading through dedicated days like World Book Day and Roald Dahl Day, weekly rewards for children who regularly read using Reading Eggs, monthly book prizes for children who demonstrate a love of reading in school or at home.
• We have reading ambassadors to share their love of reading with their peers and younger children.

KS1

• Early reading is linked to the children’s knowledge of phonics sounds. From EYFS to Year 2 the phonics teaching is mapped to ensure that children make good progress and build on their learning throughout KS1. The books the children take home to share with their grown-ups are: linked to their current phonics levels to allow children to consolidate their phonics skills at that stage of their learning; a book of their choice and a book for parents to read to them or with them. As children progress, we also use a number of reading schemes in KS2 to match books to children’s current reading levels.
• Children in KS1 have daily phonics sessions which helps the children to learn sounds to aid their reading and develops their segmenting and blending skills. We use Read Write Inc phonics across the school.
• Guided Reading sessions also focus on a range of texts to inspire and develop reading skills across year 1 and year 2. These books are matched to the phonics skills taught at that stage in the year, allowing children to embed the phonics skills they have learnt. Pupils also receive frequent opportunities to develop their fluency skills.

KS2

• Each week the children participate in whole-class reading lessons linked to their writing focus or topic using a high-quality text. We have whole class reading lessons and guided reading sessions which explicitly develop comprehension and inference skills, prediction, summarising, explanation and retrieval skills. The children learn new vocabulary from the texts we use which we then look for in their spoken language and writing.
• Regular opportunities are planned for children to listen to a class story, read by an adult for enjoyment and pleasure and children are regularly chosen to contribute readings during our whole school special Services. Adults guide the children into making appropriate reading choices, widening their repertoire and encouraging wider reading. Children have access to Reading Eggs and Reading Eggspress which is accessed online and involves children reading material matched to their reading level and working through numerous, enjoyable, word decoding, comprehension and inference activities to develop their skills and receive online reward.

Impact

• At our school, all children learn to love books, and we make this an absolute priority.

• As we believe that reading is key to all learning, the impact of our reading curriculum goes beyond the result of statutory assessments. Children have the opportunity to enter the wide and varied magical worlds that reading opens up to them. As they develop their own interest in books, a deep love of literature across a range of genres cultures and styles is enhanced.

Reading sessions at Ivington CE Primary and Pre-School develop pupils’:

• positive attitudes to reading and an understanding of what they have read, including drawing inferences and summarising the main ideas
• discussion of an increasingly wide range of fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction and reference books or textbooks
• reading of books that are structured in different ways and reading for a range of purposes
• familiarity with a wide range of books, including myths, legends and traditional stories, modern fiction, fiction from our literary heritage, and books from other cultures and traditions
• recommendation of books that they have read to their peers, giving reasons for their choices
• identification and discussion of themes and conventions in and across a wide range of writing comparisons within and across books
• learning of a wider range of poetry by heart
• preparation of poems and plays to read aloud and to perform, showing understanding through intonation, tone and volume so that the meaning is clear to an audience
• discussion and evaluation of how authors use language, including figurative language, considering the impact on the reader
• distinguishing between statements of fact and opinion
• retrieving, recording and presenting information from non-fiction
• participating in discussions about books that are read to them and those they can read for themselves, building on their own and others’ ideas and challenging views courteously
• explaining and discussing their understanding of what they have read, including through formal presentations and debates, maintaining a focus on the topic and using notes where necessary
• being able to provide reasoned justifications for their views