Reading

In St Margaret Mary’s Junior School, we value reading as a key life skill. We intend to ensure all children can read with fluency and understanding, so that they can access the full curriculum. We are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers. It is our intention to ensure that, by the end of their time in our school, all pupils are competent readers who can recommend books to their peers, have a thirst for reading a range of genres including poetry, and participate in discussions about books, including evaluating an author’s use of language and the impact this can have on the reader. The percentage of children meeting the expected standard in reading by the end of key stage two is consistently above the local and national average. Children in our school receive an excellent reading education. As a result of this provision, and because we are constantly adapting and improving our approaches, all children achieve success with reading.

To achieve this success, we implement the following:

Any children who arrive in our school without age appropriate reading skills will be targeted with quality teaching as well as specific intervention. If children are not able to read fluently (90+ words a minute) they will access Read Write Inc. or, for children in upper key stage two, Fresh Start. By delivering this synthetic phonics programme, we ensure the teaching of reading is consistent, rigorous and of the highest quality. Our highly skilled reading lead quality assures sessions, provides regular training and practice sessions for staff and monitors children's progress. Most children are able to move through the programme rapidly. Parents and carers can help children practise phonics and read storybooks at home. Children who are accessing phonics, will also be assigned the appropriately matched e-books and will be able to access a virtual classroom which has over 850 phonics lessons – from decoding practice to supporting fluency.

In the classroom, whole class reading lessons take place every day. All children access appropriately challenging texts, covering both fiction and non-fiction genres: stories, poems, play scripts, newspaper reports, instructions, leaflets, letters. Texts often link to our wider curriculum areas to add depth of knowledge to foundation subjects and to support children's development in writing. Check out our English Curriculum Reading Spine.

We approach our reading lessons with the same teaching protocols we use in all lessons. Our five key teaching strategies (clear and explicit instruction; scaffolding and modelling; use of metacognition strategies; flexible grouping; and use of technology) ensure that all children are provided with the best opportunities to succeed. Specific reading comprehension strategies are used across school, and are linked to the reading content domains, but they also ensure children have opportunities to achieve success with the non-tested parts of the National Curriculum for reading. This approach is progressive (as the texts increase in difficulty as children move through the school) and is supported by our question stems, and the Steps to Read scheme and the 'Are You Really Reading?' strands.

Children are exposed to a wide range of words and phrases both within the texts they read and within the language used in questions. New vocabulary is taught explicitly and displayed on working walls.

Children are given opportunities to discuss and recommend books, to comment on books by the same and different authors, to comment on books with similar themes, to learn poems by heart and to develop a love of literature. We also have extracurricular book clubs and have recently had a visit from a local author, Lisa J Allen.

We have created a wide range of book spines, each with its own purpose. Throughout the curriculum, children are exposed to quality texts and have opportunities to read (see individual subject pages for additional book spines).

We are lucky to be able to provide children in our school with a wide range of books. Every class has their own selection of books (non-fiction and fiction). Many books in classrooms link to other curriculum areas studied within that year group; this offers children the opportunity to apply their reading skills across the curriculum and to extend their knowledge beyond classroom learning. Children are given the opportunity to create a wish list for their class library so that each year, every class library is topped up with books the children have selected themselves.

When children are able to read 90+ words a minute, we encourage them to select their own reading books from their class library with the help of their teacher and teaching assistant. Books in each class library are age appropriate and include a rich range of texts made up of the books that teachers, teaching assistants and the children have chosen. In our class libraries, you will find such a wide variety of books: diverse fiction books; non-fiction books; books linked to the wider curriculum; modern and classic literature; poetry books.

All children have their own reading diary. They keep a record of books they are reading and we ask parents to sign this when they have listened to their child read. Children’s reading diaries are also monitored by adults.

Children are read to by their class teacher or teaching assistant every day. This could be within a reading lesson, but is usually during story time. During this special time, we like our children to just listen to and enjoy the chosen text. Our Story Time Reading Spine has been carefully considered to ensure we are providing all children with a rich reading diet, enjoyment and knowledge and understanding of the world we live in. Some of these books are woven into our English and Class Reading Curriculum.

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