English Reading

OUR AIMS

We want our pupils to:

• Respect themselves, respect others, respect all property, and respect their community and the World around them.
• Have a positive attitude that encourages self-belief and confidence
• Achieve high standards in all areas of the curriculum.
• Respond to challenges and seize new experiences whole–heartedly.
• Take an active lead in their own learning and development throughout their life.
• Develop the spirit of enquiry leading to life-long learning.

OUR VISION FOR THIS SUBJECT

At Cheswick Green Primary, we want all children to enjoy reading, be fluent, competent and to have read widely so that they have a growing understanding of the world.  As a school, we believe that creating a culture of reading is a vital tool in ensuring our children are given the best life chances. Cultivating readers with a passion for a wide range of materials will ensure that children’s love of reading will extend far beyond the classroom and allow them to build on their skills independently through a real curiosity and thirst for knowledge.

READING CURRICULUM INTENT  

At Cheswick Green Primary, we actively encourage children to develop a love of reading and to be able to understand what they read.

Our aims at Cheswick Green Primary are to:

• Provide a range of reading for pleasure opportunities so that children develop a love of reading.
• Provide a rigorous and structured phonics programme to ensure that children can decode age appropriate books, with access to books that will support their early reading and beyond. * See Our Phonics Intent, Implementation and Impact document
• Develop the children’s reading fluency by a whole school focus on automaticity, and accuracy prosody.
• Develop the children’s oral and written comprehension skills, with skilled questioning and opportunities for discussion at the heart of this.
• Expose children to rich and varied vocabulary though real and engaging texts.
• Provide reading as models for the children’s own writing and make the link between reading and writing explicit to the children.
• Support children in reaching year group expectations and put timely intervention in place where needed and as appropriate

READING CURRICULUM IMPLEMENTATION

At Cheswick Green we develop children’s reading fluency throughout the school by explicitly building in opportunities to develop the children’s automaticity, accuracy and prosody. Developing children’s prosody begins with our youngest children in EYFS before they can even read, through lots of speaking and listening activities, the use of stories with repeated patterns, and role play. As children learn to read, we help the children become automatic with text through a range of games, flash cards and activities to strengthen word recognition and accuracy in their reading.  Fluency strategies are then used in whole class lessons, guided reading and 1-1 reading sessions including the use of tracking the text, echo reading and practising texts for performance.

Regular guided reading sessions in Foundation through to year 2, enables teachers to ensure that children are developing fluency with their reading so that they can have a more secure understanding of the text. Guided reading enables teachers to work closely with small groups to also develop their comprehension skills. 

In our school, our reading curriculum links closely with our writing curriculum; we use a text-based approach that enables us to create opportunities for reading, discussion and writing within English and reading lessons. In this endeavour, we teach whole class immersed in reading sessions alongside guided reading. This is where we immerse the children in a class text, picture book or extract so that we can expose the children to rich and varied vocabulary and different language structures.  These in turn become models for the children’s own writing. As the children move higher up the school, regular whole class immersed in reading sessions, replace guided reading. In these classes, children who are still struggling to decode age appropriate books, in addition to the whole class lessons are provided with timely intervention.

Throughout the school, we have a skills based approach to reading using VIPERS (Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explain, Retrieve and Sequence/Summarise).  These skills are taught explicitly to the children, and regularly referenced throughout our reading lessons.

READING CURRICULUM IMPACT

The following outcomes are the result of our provision in English:

• Regular fluency instruction will improves the children’s understanding of texts and in turn strengthen their comprehension skills.
• Staff who are enthusiastic in their approach and promote a love of Reading;
• A reading curriculum which equips pupils for the next phase of their education and beyond;
• Pupils who can decode texts confidently and fluently so that they can enjoy and understand what they are reading;
• Pupils who are able to make links between reading and writing and write as readers, and read as writers;
• A body of staff who are continuously evolving and improving to meet the needs of pupils as they move through the school;
• A governing body who are clear about what the English teaching and learning of reading provision looks like within the school.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES IN READING

Where children have a physical disability or have SEND, we aim to provide resources and learning experiences that will support their learning in music. We do this by setting suitable learning challenges, responding to each child’s different needs and providing learning opportunities that enable all pupils to make progress.

Activities should be carefully planned by the class teacher and be differentiated where appropriate for children with SEN and equally the more able and Gifted and Talented children. All resources/materials have been reviewed with equal opportunities in mind, e.g. race, gender, ethnicity. Learning experiences in music will be available to every child, regardless of race, gender, class or ability. Pupils will be encouraged to value social and cultural diversity through musical experiences. They will listen to, and participate in, a variety of experiences in a positive and constructive role.

INCLUSION

Inclusion is about every child having educational needs, that every child is special and the School is meeting these diverse needs in order to ensure the active participation and progress of all children in their learning.

Inclusive practice in Reading should enable all children to achieve their best possible standard; whatever their ability, and irrespective of gender, ethnic, social or cultural background, home language or any other aspect that could affect their participation in, or progress in their learning.

We recognise that in all classes, children have a wide range of reading ability, and so we seek to provide suitable learning opportunities for all children by matching the challenge of the task to the ability of the child. We achieve this in a variety of ways:

• setting tasks which are open-ended and can have a variety of responses;
• setting tasks of increasing difficulty;
• grouping children by ability and setting different tasks for each group;
• grouping children in mixed ability groups;
• providing resources of different complexity, depending on the ability of the child;
• using classroom assistants to support the work of individuals or groups of children.