Reading Curriculum
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss
Rationale
The overarching aim for English in the national curriculum is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written language, and to develop their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment. – National Curriculum 2014
At St Anne’s CE Primary School, all of our children are provided with purposeful opportunities to develop language and communication skills, imagination, curiosity and a love of reading and writing through daily English lessons. A carefully planned curriculum and engaging children learn the skills they need to make progress in Speaking and Listening, Reading, Writing and Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling (GPS). In addition, children in the Early Years, Key Stage 1 and beyond access Phonics.
Intent
At St Anne’s, reading and the teaching of reading is the foundation of our curriculum. Our main aim is to ensure that all children become primary literate and progress in the areas of Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening so that they can access the full curriculum offer. Teaching children to read confidently, for information and for pleasure is the most important thing that we do. We have high aspirations for all our children and it is essential that, by the end of their primary education, all pupils are able to read fluently, and with confidence, in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education. We have ensured that our inclusive curriculum meets the needs of all learners, including those with SEND.
Implementation
The Reading curriculum is enhanced by high quality diverse texts and progressively builds knowledge, understanding and skills. Strong links are made across all curriculum areas to ensure knowledge does not sit in isolation. Meaningful links with other subjects are made to strengthen connections, enable a deeper understanding of vocabulary and allow opportunities for our pupils to transfer knowledge and language across curriculum areas, thus enhancing communication, language and literacy across the curriculum.
Carefully-chosen literature from Nursery to Year 6 includes a range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, with culturally- diverse texts and authors designed to broaden the limited experiences of some of our community. A programme of excursions, detailed as part of the Experience Map, including museums and theatre visits and the residential, are carefully planned across all curriculum subjects to enhance the background knowledge and vocabulary our children need to support reading comprehension and vocabulary. Vocabulary and knowledge are both taught explicitly within our reading lessons.
By the end of Key Stage One, our children will already be successful, fluent decoders through the delivery of consistent high quality, systematic synthetic phonics teaching from EYFS until the end of KS1 (following the RWI programme). They understand that they use their phonics knowledge as the first tool when tackling new words in reading and writing. They will also have a growing understanding of text meaning which will be further developed during Key Stage 2.
In Key Stage 2, the children who have not completed the schools chosen SSP programme are assessed regularly, by experienced phonics teachers, to ensure that they have phonics teaching pitched at the appropriate level. Children who did not pass the Phonics Screening Check in Year 2 are monitored, to ensure that they have opportunities to reach the age related level of attainment.
Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)
Dialogic reading
In Nursery, we use a strategy where, instead of reading to a passive reader who simply sits and listens, we utilise dialogue to engage them in the text. In short, our skilled adults read with children, instead of to them. Generally, staff ask children questions about what’s happening, and what they think might happen next.
Read Write Inc
At St Anne’s, we use the Read Write Inc (RWI) programme to get children off to a flying start with their phonics and reading. RWI is a method of learning centred around letter sounds and phonics, and we use it to aid children in their early reading and writing. Using RWI, the children learn to read effortlessly so that they can put all their energy into comprehending what they read.
When using RWI to read the children will:
- learn 44 sounds and the corresponding letter/letter groups using simple picture prompts
- learn to read words using Fred Talk
- read lively stories featuring words they have learned to sound out
- show that they comprehend the stories by answering questions.
When using RWI to write the children will:
- learn to write the letters/letter groups which represent 44 sounds.
- learn to write words by saying the sounds in Fred Talk
- write simple sentences
The Read Write Inc Website has some great tutorial videos to help you understand how Read Write Inc works and how you can support your child at home:
- Parent Tutorial
- Sound Pronunciation Guide
- Free eBook Library
- Lots more Parent Tutorials that can support the teaching of sounds can be found by clicking here
Reading National Curriculum Programme of Study
The programmes of study for reading at Key Stages 1 and 2 consist of 2 dimensions:
- word reading
- comprehension (both listening and reading)
It is essential that teaching focuses on developing pupils’ competence in both dimensions; different kinds of teaching are needed for each.
Skilled word reading involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. Underpinning both is the understanding that the letters on the page represent the sounds in spoken words. This is why phonics should be emphasised in the early teaching of reading to beginners (ie unskilled readers) when they start school.
Good comprehension draws from linguistic knowledge (in particular of vocabulary and grammar) and on knowledge of the world. Comprehension skills develop through pupils’ experience of high-quality discussion with the teacher, as well as from reading and discussing a range of stories, poems and non-fiction. All pupils must be encouraged to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction to develop their knowledge of themselves and the world they live in, to establish an appreciation and love of reading, and to gain knowledge across the curriculum. Reading widely and often increases pupils’ vocabulary because they encounter words they would rarely hear or use in everyday speech. Reading also feeds pupils’ imagination and opens up a treasure house of wonder and joy for curious young minds.
It is essential that, by the end of their primary education, all pupils are able to read fluently, and with confidence, in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education.
At St Anne’s, we teach English by following the Literacy Tree. Literacy Tree is a complete, thematic approach to the teaching of primary English that places children’s literature at its core.
Literacy Tree is an award-winning platform which has designed a curriculum which immerses children in a literary world, therefore creating strong levels of engagement to provide meaningful and authentic contexts for primary English. Children become critical readers and writers and acquire an authorial style as they encounter a wide-range of significant authors and a variety of diverse fiction, non-fiction and poetry. As a whole-school approach, children explore at least 100 literary texts and experience over 75 unique significant authors as they move through the school. It provides complete coverage of all National Curriculum expectations for writing composition, reading comprehension, grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary, as well as coverage of spelling. All plans lead to purposeful application within a wide variety of written outcomes. At our school, the Literacy Tree texts are mapped out to ensure progression and National Curriculum coverage across all year groups.
For more information about Literacy Tree, follow the link below: https://literacytree.com/how-it-works/
Please have a look at some of our wonderful texts:
Reading Assessments
Reading is assessed both formatively and summatively:
- All children accessing RWInc are assessed termly using a thorough and robust and accurate assessment tracker, homogenous groups are then evaluated to ensure that each child will ‘keep up’ rather than ‘catch up.
- Read Write Inc. The Read Write Inc. Phonics Year 1 Phonics Assessment focuses on the sounds children
must know to meet the requirements of the Phonic Screening Check. It also checks their
ability to read the same sounds in nonsense words – National Phonics Screening takes place in June. - From Year 2 onwards, we use the Accelerated Reader Reading Tests half-termly. After the assessment is carried out the results are collated and intervention sessions are timetabled for those children falling below their chronological reading age.
- National Assessments (SATS) in Year 6 take place in May.
- In Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1, daily Keep-Up is used, to ensure that gaps in learning are addressed for individual children. In Year 2 and Key Stage 2, Catch-Up sessions are timetabled daily for groups of children/individual children that require catch-up for previously taught phonics, as well as for those new to phonics. These rapid sessions re-teach the key elements of the phonics programme over a shorter period of time, to allow children to catch-up and fill gaps in their learning. Both of these programmes are developed by RWInc and follow the same progression.
Targeted Intervention
Through careful and regular assessment, children who are not meeting age related expectations or who are not making sufficient progress, will receive targeted, bespoke intervention which is reviewed on a regular basis. Whether it be a repeat of the KS1 phonics programme or daily 1:1 reading, these children will be carefully monitored and supported to ensure they reach their full potential. External advice and support will be obtained if intervention and quality first teaching does not result in progress for these children
Love of Reading and Reading Aloud
At St Anne’s, reading aloud is seen as an integral approach across all key stages. Daily story time is valued and enjoyed by staff and children across school and enables children to respond more deeply to what they have heard, than when they have read it themselves. This time is valued by staff and children alike, a time in which children can simply enjoy a book without interruption or analysis. When reading aloud, staff model skilled reading behaviours such as pace, prosody and expression.
Quality literature is the heart of our reading curriculum, classroom libraries, the Reading Shed and Reading for Pleasure Book Bags are well stocked and children are encouraged to enjoy reading at every opportunity. Like well-curated bookstores reading spaces in school are inviting, with front facing books that are regularly rotated using a less is more approach. Durham Learning Resource Library Service is a valuable resource ensuring access to reading across forms, authors, poets, illustrators topics and themes.
Home Reading
At school, we encourage your child to read a range of books and talk about the books they read. Our reading scheme, located in the school library and class libraries provide children with texts in different forms- non-fiction books, modern fiction, poetry and key classics. We encourage our children read their home reading books every day and these are discussed and changed regularly by the class teacher and Teaching Assistant. In class children enjoy reading a book and then recommending it to their friends, which is all part of our drive to building a strong reading culture.
From their earliest starting points our children are encouraged to develop good home-school reading routines. Each week children in EYFS and KS1 select a ‘reading for pleasure book’- together with an adult- from a wide selection of books in class libraries. Parents are encouraged to read these stories to children as part of a bedtime story routine.
Reception and KS1 children take home a reading book each day from our Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme (SSP), (Read Write Inc.) Reading books are fully decodable and sequential and allow children to practise sounds they have already learnt in class.
Because reading is a priority in our school, we dedicate every afternoon to hearing/’teaching’ children read on a 1 to 1 basis or in a guided reading group with a teacher or one of our thoroughly- skilled Teaching Assistants. Children will be moved up through the stages when their teacher feels that they are fluent with the words within that stage and they are confident that the child is making meaning from the text.
Impact
- Read easily, confidently and fluently.
- Actively read the text for meaning to ensure that the story is understood and read with fluency and expression.
- Develop an understanding of reading to comprehend the text.
- Exposure to a range of text genres.
- Immersed in a reading environment.
- Develop a love of reading and an encouragement for wider reading.
- Exposed to a wide variety of vocabulary and phrases.
- Work collaboratively to enhance their spoken language and embed their understanding.
- Assessed daily within class, and regularly by the Reading Leader.
- Demonstrate understanding in the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check.
- Demonstrate understanding in the statutory tests at the end of the key stage.
