Reading

Statement of Intent, Implementation and Impact

English is at the heart of our curriculum in our federation. Our curriculum is designed with the intent that all children will become fluent readers who have a love of reading and an appreciation of the value of books, and creative writers with a sound understanding of grammar and technical features. Our personalised, culturally rich, spiral curriculum that we have developed instils in all children a love of reading and writing that will hopefully last them a lifetime. Through our use of high quality, cross curricular texts and vocabulary rich environments, our children are exposed to a language heavy, creative English curriculum. The National Curriculum in England: English Programmes of Study (Appendix 1) forms the foundation of our curriculum here at our federation but we ensure that our children gain additional skills, knowledge and understanding by enhancing and personalising our curriculum, when necessary, to ensure that they know more, remember more and understand more. Through the curriculum we have developed we encourage all children to be motivated, reflective and resilient learners.

Intent for learning

We value reading as a life skill and we are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers; we are committed to fostering a love of reading. We strive to teach children to read effectively and quickly, using the Letters and Sounds programme which includes teaching synthetic phonics, sight vocabulary, decoding and encoding words. We believe that teaching children to read and write independently, as quickly as possible, is essential. These fundamental skills not only underpin the rest of the curriculum but also have an enormous impact on children’s self-esteem and their future life chances.

At Cledford we:

• teach children to read with fluency and expression. Through our curriculum, children develop their ability to comprehend and critique a variety of texts across different genres

• give pupils the opportunity to apply their reading skills across the curriculum

• have a wide range of quality texts available in our library for the children to read at home and school

• understand the importance of sharing and exploring high quality texts

Implementation of learning

We teach daily systematic phonics lessons in every class from EYFS through to year 2. Teachers use continuous assessment for learning to ensure the children are stretched and challenged and those children that require additional support are identified so they ‘keep up, not catch up’. Phonics is clearly linked with early reading with children receiving daily morning reads in small groups with an adult in year 1. Across EYFS and KS1, pupils’ reading books are closely matched to their increasing knowledge of phonics and ability to read ‘tricky words’ so that they experience early reading success as well as consolidating the learning that takes place within the taught phonics lessons.

In KS2, pupils are taught reading through daily Guided Reading sessions where they are experience a variety of different genres and authors, learn comprehension skills and are exposed to a rich and varied vocabulary. Reading skills are also taught through lesson starters in other subjects, giving children the opportunity to develop and apply their reading skills across the curriculum. Pupils who experience difficulties in learning to read are supported through the FFT intervention which is delivered 1 to 1 by trained staff daily.

At Cledford, we promote the importance of reading and foster a love of it in a variety of ways:

• Children are read to by an adult every day

• Reading is celebrated in every classroom with designated areas for reading and high quality reading material that is easily accessible

• The importance of reading is enhanced through the delivery of parent workshops for reading and phonics and regular parent stay and read sessions

• Subject specific texts which link with other areas of the curriculum and texts that can be read for pleasure books are available in each classroom.

• We make full use of the Education Library Service to further support the reading resources in school

Impact of learning

Through the teaching of systematic phonics, our aim is for all children to become fluent and competent readers by the end of KS1.  Pupils can then focus on developing further their fluency and comprehension as they move through the school.

Although it is our aim for the % of pupils working at age related expectations at the end of each key stage to be at least in line with national averages and for there to be no significant gaps in the progress or attainment of different groups of pupils, we firmly believe that reading is the key to all learning and the impact of our reading curriculum goes far beyond assessment results. We want children to leave our federation as life-long readers who will read for pleasure and who are able to reference a wide range of different authors, from different literary traditions and genres. We hope that as children move on from us to further their education and learning that their passion for reading travels with them and continues to grow and develop as they do.  

We value reading as a life skill and we are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers; we are committed to fostering a love of reading. We strive to teach children to read effectively and quickly, using the Letters and Sounds programme which includes teaching synthetic phonics, sight vocabulary, decoding and encoding words. We believe that teaching children to read and write independently, as quickly as possible, is essential. These fundamental skills not only underpin the rest of the curriculum but also have an enormous impact on children’s self-esteem and their future life chances.

At Cledford we:

• teach children to read with fluency and expression. Through our curriculum, children develop their ability to comprehend and critique a variety of texts across different genres

• give pupils the opportunity to apply their reading skills across the curriculum

• have a wide range of quality texts available in our library for the children to read at home and school

• understand the importance of sharing and exploring high quality texts

Supporting reading development in school and at home

One of the greatest gifts we can give a child is the ability to read. We believe that reading should be an enjoyable activity, and our approach to reading is based on this.

At Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1 there is great emphasis on the teaching of reading using a structured phonics programme.  At Key Stage 2 we extend and develop each child’s reading skills to enable them to be confident, independent and skilled readers. We aim to develop a love of reading and therefore encourage our children to take books home and share them with parents. Children need to be able to read with understanding, for pleasure and for information.

The children work their way through phonetcially decodable and levelled books until they eventually become ‘free readers’.  As both levelled and free readers, the children’s reading is monitored regularly and they are encouraged to choose books which are both appropriately challenging and of a range of genres and authors.

Reading skills are taught through group and whole class lessons. Our children are taught to read fluently and with expression and to be able to demonstrate an understanding of what they have read through a variety of activities. We encourage our parents to read with their children daily to support with their child’s reading.  We also read a variety of high quality texts to the children during our daily reading sessions in school. Some of these texts link with topics we are covering in other lessons and others are purely for the enjoyment and to suit the interests of the children.  Many of these texts can be found in our 'Text drivers' document below. 

Useful websites:

'Lovemybooks' is a new free website designed for parents and children to provide a while range of creative story play activities and resources.

www.lovemybooks.co.uk

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/

Reading schemes:

We use Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised books in EYFS and Year 1. These decodable reading practice books are using during reading lessons in school and are taken home. These books are also used by children in year 2-year 6 where they are taking part in phonics interventions. Reading for pleasure books also go home for parents to share and read with children. These reading for pleasure books are a mixture of 'real' books and a range of reading scheme books which are based on Reading Recovery levels to support a 'searchlight' model of reading. Further information about our approach to reading can be found in our English policy.