Reading

“Teach a child to read, keep them reading and we change everything" This is a driving motivation at Christ Church as we work together as a team knowing that together we achieve more.

Intent

At Christ Church we strive for all of our children to become the best reader that they can be in line with our school vision of being the best versions of ourselves every day in every way. We believe every one of our children can become a successful reader during their time at our academy and this will help to shape them to have a successful education and equip them for the future.

We strive to achieve the statement: ‘Every Child a Reader’ and with this in mind we have a clear, consistent, whole school approach to reading.

We want reading to be at the heart of our curriculum. We have daily direct teaching and frequent opportunities to practise and consolidate throughout the school day.

We are all about building readers at Christ Church – not purely teaching children how to read a book. It is a lifelong skill that we want our children to love and cherish throughout their lives.

During their time at our academy, we want to enable our children to become enthusiastic, independent and reflective readers.

We believe success in reading has a direct effect upon progress in all other areas of the Curriculum and is crucial in developing children’s self-confidence and motivation.

At Christ Church we aim to

Encourage the enjoyment of books and reading so that the children develop a life-long love of books.
Empower children to have an ‘I Can’ attitude towards reading.
Provide opportunities throughout the week to read for pleasure.
Provide the children with the skills and strategies necessary to develop into competent and fluent readers.
Provide a range of opportunities for individual reading, reading to a peer, reading to an adult, group reading and whole class reading across the school week to deepen and develop reading skills.
Encourage all of our children to read at home to embed their reading skills and develop their independence.
Develop all pupils to be confident and independent readers with high levels of understanding and comprehension.
Develop an appreciation of what they read including the work of authors, poets and illustrators and be able to draw from this in order to use these skills to enhance their own writing.
Engage with parents to ensure the culture of reading developed at our academy extends into the home

Implementation

At Christ Church we teach pupils from Year R to 6 how to read as well as sharing stories with pupils and modelling reading. This model changes to be age and ability appropriate.

Across the school we teach reading skills, discuss and enjoy books together in group reading sessions (and through a book being a stimulus in writing in KS2) and provide 1:1 sessions as additional interventions.

We ensure our children beginning in Reception class listen to stories, poems and rhymes to develop their imaginations, enhance their vocabulary and develop their comprehension on a daily basis.

We teach reading using Read Write Inc – a systematic synthetics phonics programme to teach children the alphabetic code and blending skills in order to read decodable words fluently from reception class.

We teach our children in Years 2-6 through whole class reading lessons to read at a higher level with confidence, fluency and understanding. This consists of using Schofield & Sims (which works on learning a skill each lesson) and a fluency/stamina lesson. Pupils also visit the library weekly where they often have a Readerful session.

In writing we teach using the Power of Reading. This uses carefully selected age-appropriate books that are linked to our topics that term. It aims to enhance pupils' exposure to a wider of vocabulary and develops skills to deepen their understanding of stories.

Teaching staff teach the full range of reading strategies including: -phonic knowledge, word recognition and graphic knowledge (all sources of visual information), grammatical knowledge (structural information) and contextual knowledge (meaning).

We provide a wide range of opportunities for our pupils during shared and independent reading in order for them to ensure their knowledge and skills to:

Self-monitor and correct their own mistakes by practising and applying these strategies
To acquire an interest in words and their meanings and develop a varied and rich vocabulary
To read a range of genres in fiction and poetry
To read and comprehend range of non-fiction texts and use them across the curriculum
To develop their own powers of imagination, inventiveness and critical awareness
Discuss books with reference to author, illustrator, genre, theme and characters in order to express personal responses with increasing fluency
Teach the children a suitable technical vocabulary through which to understand and discuss their reading
Develop an interest in books and read with enjoyment in order to evaluate and justify their preferences

As ways of ensuring pupils are progressing with their reading we have a range of ways to provide support and check their progress:

Provide intervention for children who need additional support with Reading. 1:1 Reading Recovery lessons, Better Reading Partnership lessons, inference training, Freshstart and monitor progress of vulnerable readers across the school
Continually assessing our children throughout their primary schooling to check they are “balanced” readers, not just able to decode but to read with fluency, phrasing and comprehension. We do this through regular assessment of children using a consistent approach of benchmarking to ensure correct instructional texts are being used.
Reading tests and scores in KS2
Read Write Inc assessments every 6-8 weeks to include Reading speed
Monitoring through team meetings and pupil progress meetings
Reading monitoring and drop ins by Reading Lead to all classes