Curriculum Statement: Reading

Intent

Our intent is to instil a passion for books and love of reading for every child from the start of their journey at Gisburn with the ambition to be an outstanding reader. We aim to ensure every child is a confident decoder with a maturing understanding and passion for books by the end of KS1. We build upon this fluency by focussing upon further improving comprehension and language in KS2 through a range of collaborative and independent learning styles. We intend to develop confident readers that continue to develop a love of books which educate, challenge and enthral them throughout their time at Gisburn and beyond. 

At Gisburn we recognise that the teaching of reading in KS1 will look different in some aspects to the teaching of reading in KS2. We have used the EEF ‘Improving Literacy in KS1’ and ‘Improving Literacy in KS2’ in conjunction with early year’s research to support our approach to the teaching of reading across school. We aim to ensure our curriculum promotes ambition, consistency, progression and develops best practice across school. 

We aim to ensure our curriculum promotes ambition,  consistency, progression and develops best practice across school.  It is important that children are motivated to read at home regularly. When their reading opportunities increase, so does their fluency and stamina which in turn increases their enjoyment of reading. Therefore, the link between children’s motivation to read and reading for pleasure is reciprocal.

Furthermore, we know that reading pleasure is beneficial not only for not only reading outcomes, but for wider learning enjoyment and mental wellbeing. Thus, we work hard to foster a love of independent reading and build communities of engaged readers. We understand the significance of parents and carers in supporting their children to develop both word recognition and comprehension skills so we endeavour to build a home-school partnership which enables parents and carers to have the confidence to support their children with reading at home. Reading is at the very heart of our curriculum. We are committed to promoting a love for reading and not only giving children opportunities to read in English lessons, but in the wider curriculum too.

Our aims for reading are to:

• Instil children with a love of reading that lasts for their lifetime, share with them an enthusiasm for children’s literature and help children to recognise the value of reading as a life skill.
• Encourage children to become enthusiastic and reflective readers by introducing them to good quality books, from a variety of cultures and in a range of different styles and formats.
• Develop our children’s understanding of a variety of text types including non-fiction, fiction, poetry and drama.
• Develop children’s confidence, fluency, and independence when reading for different purposes.
• Develop children’s abilities to reflect on and have an interest in what they have read and the language and punctuation choices made by the author.
• Use drama and role-play, where appropriate, to immerse children in the text.
• Ensure our children have sound phonic awareness and use a phonics first approach to reading.
• To read widely across the curriculum

Implementation 

Phonics

Learning to read is one of the most important things a child will ever learn. It underpins everything else, so we believe in putting as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible. We also want our children to develop a real love of reading and to want to read for themselves. This is why we work hard to make sure children develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read.

We start teaching phonics in Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression through Y1 and in Y2 (for those children who have not passed the phonics screening check). This ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code,

(See Phonics and Early Reading Policy)

Reading Fluency in Year 2 and 3

In Year 2 ,once children have completed Phase 5 set 5 of the Little Wandle Reading Program Children complete a fluency assessment and if they can read 60-70+ words per minute with an accuracy rate of 90% then they are ready to exit the program and read non-decodable books from our Collins Big Cat Scheme.

Each Fluency reading lesson is 25 minutes. The structure of every lesson is the same:

• A pre-read to practise reading words and to support vocabulary
• Children read independently for ten minutes and the teacher ‘taps in’ to hear children reading
• Focused teaching of prosody, repeated reading and comprehension through discussion. Comprehension is taught through dialogic talk and teachers use their AfL to quickly address misconceptions and develop children’s curiosity and engagement with each book.
• Children complete 3 written response questions during each session using the reading content domains.

Children’s reading speed and accuracy is assessed every 12 weeks and these assessments are used to monitor progress. We also use Assessment for Learning (AfL) and our professional judgement to assess each child’s progress in reading, so we can ensure that they have the right books to meet their needs. We review children’s prosody by using a Prosody grid. This gives us a picture of how well each child is reading aloud.

Guided Reading in Year 4, 5 and 6

During our guided reading sessions in Doves and Eagles Classes, we ensure that the children are exposed to a core set of rich literature from classic to contemporary, fiction, non-fiction and poetry.  Our reading spine is designed to ensure skills coverage, build knowledge, vocabulary development and progression of skills. As stated in the intent, our aim is to ensure all our children are able to read texts which educate, challenge and enthral.  This is alongside non-fiction and poetry to ensure the curriculum builds upon the text types visited each year. Other texts are also included which support our wider curriculum to ensure our children encounter texts which promote diversity and deepen knowledge.

Guided Reading is taught daily for 30 minute sessions.  Classes will read one high quality text over a half term. This allows for a deep understanding / analysis of a text, characters, settings and themes.

The structure of the first four lesson is the same:

• A pre-read to practise reading words and to support vocabulary
• Children read independently for ten minutes and the teacher ‘taps in’ to hear children reading
• Focused teaching of prosody, repeated reading and comprehension through discussion. Comprehension is taught through dialogic talk and teachers use their AfL to quickly address misconceptions and develop children’s curiosity and engagement with the book.
• Children complete 3 written response questions during each session using the KS2 reading content domains.

Guided Reading on a Friday will be a ‘Cold Comprehension’.

During this session, children will read a ‘cold text’. Children will answer questions using a range of comprehension skills (e.g. summarising, predicting, true or false, sequencing etc.) reinforcing the skills focussed on throughout the week.

Home Reading

All pupils are expected and encouraged to read their home reading books a minimum of 3 times per week at home.

Reception / Year 1:

The decodable reading practice book is taken home to ensure success is shared with the family.

An additional unseen decodable reading practice book matched to the child’s phonic knowledge is also taken home each week to share with parents and carers.

Reading for Pleasure (RfP) books also go home for parents to share and read to children. We share the research behind the importance and impact of sharing quality children’s books with parents through workshops, leaflets and the Everybody Read resources.

We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised parents’ resources to engage our families and share information about phonics, the benefits of sharing books, how children learn to blend and other aspects of our provision, both online and through workshops.

In addition, weekly phonics sheets are sent home for children to  reinforce learning that has taken place in class that week to allow the children the opportunity to extend and embed their learning.

Class Reading Areas

The school boasts a host of rich reading environments throughout our corridors and in every classroom with different themes - a Starbooks Café, a magical Harry Potter themed book corner and a jungle inspired book nook!  Books are displayed in interesting and exciting ways with a variety of texts including fiction, non-fiction and poetry,that reflect the different interests and abilities within the class and current topics.

Children have free choice of these books to take home as a ‘Reading for Pleasure’ book. Each class also has ‘Library Time’ each week, where books can be reviewed / swapped in our school library.. Books across the school are regularly audited in terms of appropriateness and assessed as to their popularity and, whenever possible through fund raising and book fairs, new books are added to the school library and classrooms.  All texts are chosen to enthuse our children and build confidence with their reading of different text types and intend to ensure children enjoy reading.

Independent Reading Time

Children in KS1 and KS2 have dedicated independent reading time of 15 minutes daily. Independent Reading time is both 'me time and we time' for reading. Supported by staff, children make their choices, and engage in book related play, silent or social reading, informal book talk and recommendation. They may also revisit 'books in common.' Over time, children broaden their repertoires, develop fluency and stamina, and nurture their pleasure in reading.

Reading Events

Over the year, each class holds a ‘Stay and Read’ event where parent / grandparents are invited into the school with their child to share stories together.

We celebrate reading together throughout the year by taking part in both school based, local and national reading initiatives including the Read for Good Readathon, National Poetry Day, World Book Day, author visits, book swaps, extreme reading challenges and book fairs. Our Reading Ambassadors run a book club to encourage regular reading for pleasure in the school library.

CPD

Regular reading CPD staff meetings are scheduled. Academic research is regularly distributed.

Parent Involvement

Recommended Reads for each year group are displayed on our school website through the Everbody Read resources to encourage children and parents to read a range of quality texts.

• We regularly educate parents to help support reading at home with their child for both reading development and pleasure through our phonics and early reading parent workshops, themed stay and reads that are timetabled throughout the year such as our cosy Christmas event, World Book Day and booknic.

Impact 

Assessment

Phonics is assessed at the end of every 5 weeks teaching block and data is input into the Little Wandle Phonics Assessment Tracker which creates a heatmap and detailed analysis of all the children’s progress. The assessments identify any child at risk of falling behind and clearly show which gaps need to be filled so that effective intervention can be planned. This can be daily keep up, rapid catch up or additional blending practice. The tracker also shows pupil trends so you can see children’s data over time and allocate indicative book levels for each child..

Reading comprehension is assessed in Year 1-6 at the end of each term using the NTS year group Reading Assessments. SAT tests allow school to judge progress and attainment against national benchmarks in years 2 and 6. In addition, we use Collins - Assess Fluency to monitor and track children’s reading speed, accuracy and comprehension.

Monitoring

Monitoring of the standards of teaching and learning and progress made by the pupils in Reading across the school is the responsibility of the head teacher, subject leader and English governor. Monitoring will include scrutiny of books, lesson observations, pupil interviews, analysis of data, fluency assessments and staff meetings to evaluate effectiveness of policies. The results of any monitoring undertaken by the subject leader will be shared with the staff, either formally or informally, form the basis of the English action plan and be used to identify future training.