Reading is at the heart of our curriculum and our staff are passionate about sharing their love of literature with the children. We are dedicated to ensuring all our learners leave our school with the necessary English skills needed to function effectively at secondary school. We have built a reading community centred around reading for pleasure and inspiring children to read books that they may not have chosen to read without our guidance. We want our children to read broadly and engage in conversations about the books they have read, make recommendations and share their love of books with others. Through our carefully planned reading curriculum, and promotion of reading for pleasure, we encourage our children to become passionate readers too.  

Alongside the clear academic benefits, we also believe reading allows children to relax their brain, calm their mind and widen their understanding of the world beyond their experiences. We know that reading helps to develop children’s imagination, vocabulary and concentration. We engage with parents and families to help share our view on the benefits of developing a culture for reading.  

Reading for Pleasure 
At St Peter’s, we promote a love of reading through the use of high quality texts within English lessons. We carefully choose books to inspire and motivate children to become better readers and develop a curiosity for reading and an interest in stories. We create a reading culture through the promotion of books 
within classes and whole school assemblies, celebrating the reading with parents and the wider community. Children have ‘Book Bingo’ reading challenges within their reading diaries to encourage and incentivise them to read a wide and diverse range of books. Teachers share a class novel with their children on a daily basis purely as an opportunity to gain enjoyment from a story. These books could be chosen as a means of enhancing a particular curriculum focus but the overall focus is to select a book to engage the children and seek enjoyment.  

Our staff, promote reading for pleasure and support with regular events throughout the school year - whether in be reading in the woods in their onesies and wellies, or 'drop everything and read' initiatives during lesson time! Reading recommendations shared frequently - by teachers, librarians and peers using the class sketch books, in order to promote texts and share enjoyable reading experiences. We endeavour to keep our class bookshelves stocked with modern, appealing books that the children are proud to take home.  

Parents are involved in reading through the promotion of the Book Bingo challenge. Alongside this, there is an expectation that parents read at home regularly with their children and sign reading diaries. These diaries are checked by teachers on a weekly basis. This opportunity for parental engagement quickly allows us to establish children who are less motivated to read. Designated 'reading champions' in each year group support with engaging, supporting and motivating pupils with their reading journey.

Reading for fluency 
We ensure that pupils continue to make progress in reading accuracy and fluency in Year 3 through a robust screening approach. All children are screened on entry to the school using phonicstrackeronline.com. These results enable us to group children based on the precise sounds missing from their reading code, intervening with striking impact.  

Children all undertake regular assessments in reading and children falling behind are quickly identified and support is put in place. Phonics groups are quickly established and children’s revision of the phonic code help children to increase fluency. These children identified for phonics intervention receive daily support sessions to help rapidly reduce gaps in learning through a robust approach, No Nonsense Phonics. 

Through the support and advice of Carl Pattison at The English Hub, school follows the No Nonsense Phonics (NNP) approach to the teaching of phonics code. A key stage 2 approach was developed and refined to build on prior knowledge, with frequent assessment opportunities and the use of phonicstrackeronline. All teachers have received phonics training across school and are loyal to phonics when children are decoding words or developing in reading fluency across the school. This scheme has been supplemented by Big Cat Collins fully decodable reading books, specifically purchased to appeal to Key Stage 2 readers who are still not meeting age related expectations.  

Regular monitoring and assessments rapidly identify children failing to make sufficient progress. Teachers endeavour to diagnose the root cause of the issue in order to put the best intervention in place. Whether this be reading speed, understanding, skills in decoding or potentially difficulties including dyslexia, the root cause needs identifying in order to address the concern and respond accurately. 

All whole class comprehension lessons include the opportunity for readers to read at length. Children learn to respond and read back in a choral fashion to improve fluency. They also provide opportunities to re-read extracts previously discussed with the purpose of increasing reading fluency.  

Children who are identified as being 'off track' beyond the teaching of phonics are targeted for additional reading intervention. Recent strategies from CPD with Christopher Such have been the inspiration for these reading interventions which have been adapted and implemented in years 4, 5 and 6. These interventions include:

1) Fluency reading (scaffolded decoding practice)

2) Extended reading (addressing breadth)

3) Close reading (deeper text discussion/comprehension) 
 

Reading for Meaning and Understanding

Our approach to the teaching of reading comprehension is linked to the use of extracts in order to encourage reading at length, whilst accessing rich and challenging literature. Comprehension is explicitly taught - as opposed to tested - and teachers scaffold responses to model high quality responses. Teachers have developed this approach through designing a bespoke system to support the emerging needs of the pupils at St Peter’s. This system has been designed specifically to complement our writing clusters approach to the teaching of writing, encompassing elements linked to the specific teaching of vocabulary. Teachers assess understanding through analysis of children’s written responses and opportunities are regularly created for children to edit and improve their original responses in order to add greater depth and detail. 

If you would like further information on the curriculum we teach, please contact the school directly.