Reading
At Moordown St John’s, our belief is that every child should be a reader and we work to achieve this through a broad and balanced curriculum taught from Reception to Year 6. Through our teaching and learning, children are given a secure foundation in both the ability to read (decode) texts and to comprehend them. Our aim is tonurture a life-long love of reading for information and pleasure. The curriculum builds progressively on prior learning, using repetition and interleaving to help children to commit their learning to long term memory. As a Church of England School, a strong Christian ethos underpins all aspect of school life and this is centred on our school values: The Fruits of the Spirit. Our Reading curriculum is delivered in a way that recognises the varied needs of our children and allows each individual to maximise their learning potential through focused guided reading sessions; preparing them for the application of reading skills across the whole curriculum and to create an enjoyment of reading that extends outside of school and into their daily lives
Intent: What we expect children to learn
At Moordown St John’s, we strive for consistency and fluency in reading across the school and the subjects. Our goals to provide a secure foundation in both the ability to read (decode) texts and comprehend them are interleaved within other subjects, to continually re-inforce and develop our children’s reading abilities. Our specific objectives are:
Read any text-story: Develop core skills/techniques to decode any text.
Read a range of genres: including Non-fiction, fiction and poetry. A range of genres exposes children to variety in writing and a broadened ability to decode and comprehend texts.
Become fluent readers and maximise potential: Children will read at a consistent pace with expression. By the end of the child’s time at Moordown St John’s, they will be free reading any text of their choice
Develop a love for reading: By developing the ability to comprehend what is being read, can capture children’s imagination and natural creativity.
Use reading skills in the wider world: Reading is used in everyday life, such as ingredients, online and most job applications.
Implementation: How we teach the subject
We have a consistency across the school that ensures there are three 45 minute guided reading sessions a week, or equivalent, incorporated with opportunities to read for pleasure. This allows focus within lessons on word reading and decoding, comprehension and whole class discussions around texts and subject specific vocabulary. For children who are not yet reading at the age related expectation, extra support is provided by way of additional individual reads with adults in the year group on a weekly basis, along with focused IEP and intervention time.
In order to promote a love of reading, it is important to model this as teachers, therefore a class story, chosen by the class teacher, is read within classrooms to the children. This exposes children to a range of genres and an enjoyment for reading. The class book can be linked to the current topic of learning or an additional book of choice. Each class has a class library in conjunction with the school library, stocked with a range of books for children to choose from. All children can choose a book to read, at a difficultly level of their choosing.
To support and reinforce what is learned during the guided reading sessions, there is shared reading across all curriculum subjects-books linked to foundation topics. For example, a focus of Victorians in Year 6 History provides opportunities to read and unpick Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist.
Impact: How we evaluate the knowledge and skills they have learned
Our children will leave the school having at least the ability to decode and comprehend text and use their basic learning to read unfamiliar words. They will be well balanced, knowledgeable children who are aware of the world around them.
Our aim is to further develop these basic skills and maximise each child’s potential. We encourage children’s natural creativity and imagination and create excitement around the joys of reading and the world of books. This is how they become fluent readers and develop a love of books, prepared for life beyond Moordown St John’s.