Respect – Resilience – Read – Retain
Respect – we aim to develop a sense of respect for themselves, peers, adults, other faiths and cultures, the environment and the wider world
Resilience – we aim to develop a ‘give it a go’ and ‘its ok to make mistakes’ attitude within our children to prepare them for life beyond school
Read – we believe that reading is the doorway to all learning, we will prioritise the teaching of reading in school
Retain – we aim for our children to know more and remember more, our curriculum design will reinforce and revisit skills and knowledge
Subject Leader - Mrs Ward
At St. Teresa’s Primary School, we believe in the power and magic of reading and are passionate about nurturing a love of reading within our school and community. We recognise the varied needs of our children and believe in supporting every child to achieve their potential in reading.
Our aim is for children to acquire the key skills in reading, across the curriculum, through the teaching of phonics, word recognition and effective comprehension skills in order to become confident and competent readers.
Through following the National Curriculum and the Steps to Read Strategy we carefully selecting the texts we share, we strive to enrich vocabulary and understanding, whilst broadening their knowledge of wider life experiences. Our texts link with our writing strategy and are also linked to our curriculum giving the children chance to retrieve prior knowledge. We believe that being immersed in good quality literature, provides an opportunity for children to value our rich literary heritage. Thus, enabling them to become positive role models and contribute effectively to our diverse society.
Intent
Following the aims and objectives of the National Curriculum, the school endeavours to engender a life – long love of reading. We provide children with the skills and knowledge in order to enjoy the art of reading.
Our curriculum is structured through high quality classical and contemporary fiction and this drives its design. Similarly, non-fiction is layered across the curriculum in order to give children a broad understanding of why writers have chosen particular language or laid out text in a specific way. Moreover, books are sequenced in order to expose children to a variety of social, moral, spiritual and cultural themes so that they are able to develop cultural capital. As a result, texts are selected to challenge prejudice and broaden children‘s understanding of their roles and responsibilities as global citizens.
Different text types are carefully selected, across all year groups, so that children are systematically exposed to a variety of genres. Moreover, in understanding text variety, children recognise purpose and organisation and learning is carefully planned to enable children to debate, reason and empathise. This is particularly important in closing the speech, language and vocabulary gap, identified upon entry into nursery. Furthermore, through this, timely opportunities are seized to enhance empathy and thus, develop reading comprehension strategies and vocabulary extension.
Throughout school, it is our intention to accelerate the progress of the lowest 20% by ensuring children’s phonological accuracy is relentlessly addressed. It is our ambition that all children will leave school as fluent, confident readers with a desire to read and enjoy a range of texts.
It is our intention that all literature promotes school values of love, compassion, hope, ambition, equality and tolerance, thus embedding characteristics of effective learning and citizenship.
Through our sustained approach, children become inquisitive about language and its structure and actively read for meaning. They also develop widening knowledge and use this to make connections between subjects and aspects of learning. As a result of this, children develop an enquiring mind, which leads to children’s enhanced creativity and ability to reason and problem-solve.
Implementation
We teach phonics systematically daily, with a relentless drive to address the needs of all learners. From the outset, parents are invited to workshops and practical sessions to demonstrate letter to sound correspondence and promote consistent use of the school’s scheme. Those children struggling in phonics are never left behind because the school employs a range of strategies to close the gap, including precision teaching, direct phonics and additional interventions across school.
Children are encouraged to read at home and the school reading scheme is carefully matched, in the first instance, to children’s phonic phases. As children become more fluent, we help them make book choices, related to their interest and ensure that questioning is carefully scaffolded. In order to ensure precise use of questioning, professionals have carefully analysed the assessment focuses for reading as well as having a range of question types that are discussed weekly with the children.
Within our school’s context, ensuring children have the cultural capital and experiences to become engrossed and immersed in reading is vital. This is achieved by selecting specific texts to build upon children’s knowledge and understanding of the world and thus help them to make connections to ideas within texts. Developing a sense of awe and wonder, through selection of appropriate texts, which promote cultural and moral themes, is core and embedded across the curriculum.
In order to develop reading for meaning we teach reading with 'Steps to Read'. This plans for whole class shared reading through carefully crafted units of work. These units of work also help us to provide curriculum knowledge for foundations subjects. It empowers our teachers to teach all aspects of word reading and comprehension through high-quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts.
We provide a clear teaching sequence to reading sessions that explicitly teach reading skills and strategies in a cumulative way through evidence-based approaches. These comprehensive units have been constructed so that the entire statutory curriculum for reading is covered from EYFS to Y6. Our aim of is to teach reading comprehensions skills and strategies explicitly.
We ensure our reading strategy is
- Is sequenced, coherent and progressive
- Uses language-rich texts for vocabulary teaching
- Includes all elements of comprehension, taught sequentially across an academic year
- Has a clear focus on the skills and strategies needed to be a proficient and confident reader
- Uses engaging texts to promote a life-long love of reading
- Includes poetry, non-fiction and fiction that enhances knowledge learning across the curriculum
In addition to this shared reading is consistent across school and takes place daily through either a short story or class novel or within the reading lesson that is separate from the book focus within the writing lesson. This gives teachers opportunity to use a ‘sub-conscious’ voice and model characteristics of an effective reader, particularly questioning authorial intent, use of vocabulary and tone. Moreover, teachers engage children by modelling effective story-telling techniques including intonation and pace. Reading for pleasure is a huge part of classroom life with teachers promoting a love of reading through this shared story time. This reading is purely for the children to enjoy listening to the story rather than focusing upon the questioning within the reading and to promote story telling skills.
The reading environment is planned to engage and promote a range of books (to include high quality authors) with a strong emphasis on parental partnerships.
Impact
On-going formative assessment takes place within each reading session against the assessment focuses. This includes, teacher observations, questioning, discussions and marking and feedback of reading journals. These outcomes are fed forward into timely teacher intervention and subsequent planning to ensure gaps in knowledge are closed and progress is not limited.
Half-termly assessments are used to track progress and to identify gaps in the following reading strands, as follows:
- Inferences with evidence
- Retrieval
- Words in context
- Summarise main ideas
- Enhanced meaning
- Comparisons within a text
- Related content
Outcomes from assessments are used to identify gaps in knowledge and will inform future planning. Assessments also are used for teacher judgements in relation to the reading strategy and to assess in relation to the reading strategy where a pupil should be. This ensures that children are reading at a level that is appropriate for them to develop their reading and comprehension understanding. Assessments from the Reading Plus programme are also used in KS2 to develop word fluency as well as comprehension skills. Teachers use data from Reading Plus to assess pupil’s reading skills as well as use this to target intervention. Pupil progress will also identify precise actions and objectives for targeted focus children, including the lowest 20% who are not likely to meet end of year expectations and/or not making expected progress.
We recognise that quality first teaching in reading is the essential first step in improving outcomes for all children. With this in mind, we ensure that teachers and teaching assistants are kept up to date on the latest initiatives and news. This is through continuous professional development by outside providers and within school (such as local authority networks, TA training and partnerships). In response to monitoring, evaluation and review outcomes, weaker areas in staff subject knowledge and pedagogy are developed through staff coaching.
Across school we use these texts and subsidise them with other texts.