Reading

Intent:

Developing reading across Peover is achieved through the use of high-quality texts and ensuring small steps to depth when teaching skills, particularly inference. Lessons follow a structure of relating the text to self, book and world to ensure understanding and misconceptions are addressed. The lessons promote dialogic talk and for children to build on their understanding though discussion and self-discovery. Teachers are critical when selecting texts and planning sessions to ensure they include: opportunities to use the skill, the text has suitable vocabulary and the background knowledge of our children is considered. The main skills are: questioning, predicting, clarifying, summarising and inference which are taught both in isolation and combined together to deepen their understanding. These skills are heavily modelled during the implementation stages to provide children with the opportunities to develop them themselves and to use them independently. The scaffolding is removed carefully as they progress from EYFS to Year 6. The children take responsibility for using these strategies which support them in the monitoring and development of their reading comprehension.

Throughout their reading journeys, children begin understanding the concepts of print, how to hold a book and how they read. As they progress through school, children are explicitly taught to understand the picture book codes and terminologies including gutters, end pages and full-page bleeds which the children begin to use in their discussions and aid their comprehension of the text. There is a strong focus on children exploring the relationship between an author’s choice of words and pictures and their intent by these.

The ethos of Reading for Pleasure underpins the teaching and delivery of all lessons and informal book discussions. Teachers act as role models around this ethos by supporting them in selecting texts which tempt and also creating a social, reader-led and informal environment fuelled with passion and enthusiasm. At Peover, we instil the importance of children reading at home with their parents and other adults, who support our vision through volunteering to read in school, being secret readers and sharing books with their children at home. Misconceptions are addressed regularly through bespoke and evidence-based interventions to support progress in this area.

Design:

Our curriculum is designed to:

Create enthusiastic and passionate readers who read widely for a range of purposes.
Pupils can actively use decoding and blending skills to access familiar and unfamiliar words.
Pupils have strong knowledge of the world they live in through their reading.
Pupils independently can activate their prior learning when exploring a new text.
Pupils are fluent readers who use correct intonation and pace when reading aloud.
Pupils express a pleasure in reading and can discuss stories they have read themselves or heard.
Pupils can infer, analyse and critique an author’s choice of pictures, words and colour and can use these to make links to other texts they know.

Assessments

Recording and assessment of reading:

In the Early Years, children are continually assessed using the ‘Foundation Stage Profile’ and Early Learning Goals.

In Year groups 1 - 6 targets are set using objectives from the curriculum linked to age related expectations. These targets are continually assessed during whole class, group andd individual reading lessons. Assessment of reading takes place through on-going teacher assessment, Benchmarking (using Reading Recovery), Key Stage SATs papers and standardised tests such as NFER, Single Word Reading Test and the York Assessment of Reading Comprehension.

Reading Exemplification Materials

As part of the Aspire Educational Trust, we have worked alongside specialist colleagues in other schools to produce exemplification materials for reading at the end of Key Stages.

Children in Year 1 to Year 6 follow the National Curriculum for Reading, please click on the link here.