Reading
Reading is a vital life skill and our biggest priority, secondary only to children’s welfare. We recognise the importance of reading stories to our children as this boosts their listening skills, enhances their communication, fosters their imagination and increases their cultural understanding.
Not only does our English curriculum have built in story telling time to really focus on our carefully chosen texts, but all of our other curriculum subjects have developed a book spine so the children are exposed to a variety of stories throughout their time with us. In addition, we have designated paired reading time in KS1, which moves onto independent reading for pleasure in Years 2, 3 and 4.
All our children will read to an adult every week. To see our fantastic English book spine click here. To explore the other curriculum book spines please see the subject specific page.
We also see the importance in developing the skills of comprehension which can be applied across the curriculum so have a weekly comprehension from Years 1 to 4.
Reading Champion
Carole Baker is our Reading Champion and responsible for the 'Well Read' strand of our vision. From reading displays in the entrance hall to book recommendations in the Weekly newsletter, if you want to know anything about books Carole is the person. Carole also holds a termly Reading cafe and keep an eye out for the Reading Rocks newsletter as well as our competitions. Our next step is to enrol some Book Ninjas who will help to promote reading across school.
In addition to the Reading Walls Carole has created a PSHE and a Neurodiversity padlet full of book recommendations.
Follow the links below to find some recommended texts for each year group:
Year 2 Reading Wall (padlet.com)
Book Bands
Our children follow the Oxford Book Bands. They will read one book during paired or independent reading each week, which they will bring home, and they will bring an additional book. The idea behind this is so the children have a book that they are familiar with and feel confident to share and enjoy whilst also having the challenge of a new book to enjoy.
Comprehension
We use Complete Comprehension to enhance our reading curriculum. This programme exposes our children to a range of shorter quality texts to explore in detail and develop their comprehension skills. It focuses on teaching the children specific reading skills such as summary, retrieval and inference before challenging them to apply these skills to a range of texts.
