Vision 

Reading is what shapes us as individuals. Through the power of written word, we are allowed to be curious by seeking answers to our questions; we are allowed to be imaginative by following the events of incredible characters; we are allowed to be explorers by discovering new worlds and we are allowed to be empathisers by connecting with new characters who are on a personal journey. A love of reading changes the way we see and experience the world and we want all of our children to have these opportunities.  

Intent  

Reading underpins our entire curriculum so we are committed to fostering a love of reading as well as teaching children the skills to independently decode and comprehend. We aim to create positive reading experiences that are exciting and engaging for all.  

Our reading curriculum is centred around:  

• Teaching decoding skills, through phonics, to develop fluent readers.  

• Improving intonation, tone, expression and pace when reading aloud.  

• Developing confidence so that our children can present written texts orally through spoken word and performance.  

• Fostering a love of reading through engaging texts, modelled reading and discussion.   

• Encouraging personal responses to both new and familiar texts.  

• Recommending new texts that suit the interests of individual children. 

• Broadening our readers’ exposure to a variety of text types which they can explore and enjoy.  

• Using oracy techniques to enable our readers to discuss a variety of texts by expressing their own opinion, making recommendations and demonstrating engagement with a text.  

• Explicitly teaching the strategies to enable all children to comprehend new vocabulary and phrases, retrieve, infer, predict, explain, summarise and sequence.  

Our staff promote reading for pleasure by: 

• Pledging to read to each class for at least 15 minutes every day, in addition to timetabled reading lessons.  

• Providing opportunities for classes to visit the school library on a weekly basis. All children can choose a book to take home which is not restricted to reading ability. We encourage parents and carers to enjoy sharing these books at home.  

• Providing dedicated time for children to read for pleasure in their classrooms.  

• Curating collections of diverse and inclusive texts in classroom libraries. 

• Offering opportunities for cross-phase reading as part of our celebrations on World Book Day and sixth form helpers from our secondary site who read with children in Key Stage One.  

• Organising for the Book Fair to visit, which excites and leads to curiosity around new texts.  

• Embarking on a whole school trip to Henley Literary Festival during the Autumn Term.  

• A carefully planned Guided Reading curriculum which uses high-quality texts to allow children the opportunity to explore themes such as: pollution, habitat loss, asylum and refuge, diversity, religion and spirituality, amongst others, in an age-appropriate way. These texts are used in daily whole class lessons but are also included in class libraries for children to access at any point when reading for pleasure.   

Implementation

The teaching of reading can be seen in daily lessons from EYFS to Year 6.  

In EYFS and Key Stage One, children have daily phonics lessons. These lessons continue for 30 minutes and allow children to develop and apply the skills of sound recognition and decoding by following our chosen scheme: Rocket Phonics.  

Children in Year 1 to Year 6 have daily Guided Reading lessons.  

Our reading curriculum is sequential and progressive so that it focuses on reading fluency as well as the skills needed to be able to comprehend. Guided Reading lessons follow a weekly structure that provide opportunities for: text exploration, personal response, the use of oracy to articulate understanding and questioning to allow children to demonstrate how well they can retrieve, infer, explain, sequence and summarise. We use a variety of texts including fiction, non –fiction, poems, picture books, archaic texts and texts linked to character education as a ‘vehicle’ for teaching a variety of reading skills that can be applied to any text, in any subject.  

Our weekly teaching cycle begins on a Friday with a session dedicated to ‘hooking the reader in’ and creating a ‘buzz’ around the chosen text. Teachers use class copies of the texts to allow the children to participate in the reading experience which increases engagement. During this time, teachers model reading and use this as an opportunity to focus on decoding as well as showing children how to interpret the punctuation to read with expression, intonation and at an appropriate pace.  

In this initial session, the children will spend time reading the text aloud and using text marking to track moments of pause and emphasis which teaches them how to vary their own reading aloud and develop fluency. We also use choral reading, solo reading and paired reading to provide the children with different opportunities to develop fluency and ‘reading at a glance’.  

The children will sometimes use the book talk grid - Aidan Chambers, Tell Me: Children, Reading and Talk - to allow them to discuss and/or record their own personal response to the text by identifying their likes, dislikes, puzzles and patterns.  

In EYFS and Year 1, the children will also use Rocket Phonics Target Readers books that align directly with the sounds taught in weekly phonics lessons thus providing further opportunity for developing sound recognition and fluent decoding.    

The second lesson, in the weekly cycle of learning, focuses on developing vocabulary awareness by both broadening the children’s exposure to high-quality vocabulary and explicitly teaching the strategies that they need to make meaning from the text. The children will have the opportunity to re-read the text, either though choral reading, paired reading or modelled reading, with an emphasis on vocabulary.  

Depending on the year group and the text, learning will then focus on developing specific strategies to make meaning. Some strategies that are taught include: chunking, identifying clues in the illustrations, reading the sentence before and after for context or using a dictionary to find the definition. In these sessions, the children may also explore authorial intent and purposeful language choice to understand how authors use language to convey intent and emotion.   

The third lesson in the sequence will offer opportunities to use key questions, planned by the class teacher or by making use of resources from Literacy Shed Plus, that allow the children to use talk protocols, discussion roles and sentence stems, combined with teacher modelling, to retrieve, infer, explain, sequence and summarise. During these lessons, teachers will model how to use the framework A.P.E (answer, prove, explain) to teach children how to use written word to articulate their thinking. To end the cycle of learning, the children will apply what they have learnt and discussed in the oracy session by completing written tasks independently, which are tailored to suit the needs and age of the children.   

Learning Journey

Our learning journey illustrates the rich variety of texts that our children are exposed to as they move through the school.

For a PDF version of the learning journey, please see below.

Curriculum Maps