Passionate, Proficient, Prepared.

Intent 

To develop a curriculum which:

• Instils a love of reading across the school both for pleasure and as a fundamental skill for learning across all of the curriculum.
• Places the highest emphasis on developing reading to enable fluency and comprehension.
• Uses reading as vehicle for the whole curriculum from the beginning of children’s experience at school.
• Promotes the love of reading through story time, shared reading, reading-rich learning environments and the enjoyment of developing knowledge through texts.
• Ensures that every child (including those who are vulnerable, disadvantaged and those with SEND) is challenged and leaves as a confident, able (in fluency and comprehension) and passionate reader.
• Is underpinned by the teaching of structured phonics, and comprehension skills so that children become fluent readers.
• Gives children the opportunity to read widely and often, exposing them to an abundance of varied texts which have different purposes.
• Through the teaching of our curriculum and our strategies for embedding reading into their lives, the children have the 3 Ps when they leave school:
• Passionate for reading through experience of high-quality, diverse and challenging books reading books as part of their free-time.
• Proficient readers due to the accurate assessment of the children’s decoding and fluency ability and targeted support.
• Prepared for the next stage in their curriculum journey, aware and appreciative of differences in the world and aspiring to be the best they can be.
• To support comprehension skills, we use 'VIPERS' to guide parents in how to assist their own child in developing good comprehension skills when listening to them read at home. It details a number of useful question types that are perfect to check and assess that your child has understood their book and can retrieve information from it.

Implementation

Reading Content and Sequence

• The National Curriculum forms the basis of teaching and learning and dictates the curriculum content for Reading.
• Children are exposed to a wide variety of carefully selected texts (including stories poems, rhymes and non-fiction) to develop their knowledge within a range of areas and providing cultural enrichment.
• Vocabulary is a focus and lessons are planned to provide maximum opportunities for children to analyse the use of vocabulary.

Reading Teaching and Learning, Assessment and Feedback

• Reading is taught through the whole curriculum. In all subjects, children use reading to gain knowledge and to stimulate questions and promote further enquiry.
• To develop a love of reading, children access their class’s selection of Bakewell Brilliant Books. These books are only available to the class and offer opportunities to share the reading experience and offer recommendations and compare reviews of the selected texts. Texts are chosen after consultation between staff, using recommended reads and feedback from the children. Personal reading records are kept in school so we can monitor the reading habits of the children. The views of children will determine whether books are retained on the list of the following class.
• Children are encouraged to share and compare views about their books each week during a timetabled “Book Club”. Parents are encouraged to support the reading of this book.
• Based on phonics screening at the beginning of year 3 and monitored throughout their journey across the key stage, children are allocated a book from our reading scheme called Big Cat which is both accessible and stimulating for the child to read. This book is accessed remotely and is intended for reading by the child to develop their reading fluency and decoding skills.

Summative and formative assessment is used for gap analysis. Where gaps in children’s reading are identified, tailored additional provision is planned for to support children to close these gaps. (This support ensures that children are accessing the same content, but it is carefully broken down into small steps).

Summative assessment will occur three times a year and this leads to future intervention and support for those that require it.

• Trained staff provide Catch-up® support for children who have learning needs related to Phonics.
• Reading practice sessions run throughout the week in each class with carefully chosen books to provide a suitable challenge. These lessons focus on activating prior knowledge, annotation and looking at comprehension questions. 
• Shared reading occurs in every classroom through daily, timetabled whole class “story-time”. This is sacrosanct and is only interrupted in exceptional circumstances.
• Story-time books are selected to ensure that they broaden children’s experiences of texts. Book choices are overseen by the English subject leader and the children will be by read several high-quality books during their time at the school. The core selection of books is amended dependent on the feedback of the children and we are open to new and popular authors.

Cross-curricular learning

As reading is integral to the learning process, it is used as a stimulus to engage the children across the curriculum both to inform and instruct.