Reading
Intent:
At Marsh Green, we love reading, value its development and place a high emphasis on how we teach it. We believe that it is a shared endeavour and therefore we use a coordinated approach which contributes to the culture of reading by putting reading and book discussions at the heart of everyday learning. This in turn promotes positive attitudes towards what is, an essential life skill that is key to academic success, supportive of life-long learning and future job prospects. At Marsh Green, we view reading as a shared responsibility and therefore work in partnership with parents to build a community that continues to develop skills of literacy, interpretation and expression, but above all, allows reading to bring pleasure and enjoyment.
Our intent is to:
- build confident and capable readers who are able to access learning in all areas of the curriculum
- build skills in comprehension including retrieval, sequencing, inference and authorial intent.
Reading is taught daily, and it is our aim for children to leave Marsh Green as avid readers with excellent reading fluency and comprehension skills, which they use to express preferences and opinions and most of all a love of books.
Implementation:
Here at Marsh Green, we model and embed a love of reading from an early age. We establish enthusiasm for books and reading from Nursery through to Y6, where pupils engage in activities from storytelling and book fairs to dressing as words on 'World Book Day'. Pupils are encouraged to read for pleasure to develop their interests and as part of their access to information about subjects from across the curriculum. All classrooms are stocked with quality fiction that reflects our school library provision and non-fiction books are chosen termly from our borough’s library service to enhance a variety of topics across the curriculum.
Teachers read quality texts to pupils everyday as part of our English lessons and at ‘Read Aloud’ times our pupils experience both traditional and modern texts that represent the diverse nature of our community and the world around us. From these texts, new vocabulary is actively taught, revisited and integrated into lessons so that they are acted out in drama tasks, used in both speech and writing and ultimately become embedded into the minds of our pupils.
Guided reading takes place across the whole school daily. Groups within each class are carefully planned for, providing them with meaningful activities in all sessions. Each session has a clear learning objective and during the session, our focus is always to develop a key reading skill via modelling done by the Teacher or Teaching Assistant. Throughout the week, all children read and engage in questions with an adult. These vary throughout the school year groups and is dependent on the individual child. Each child reads as part of a guided group once a week and we provide additional 1:1 reading and / or small group reading, several times a week with our reading recovery teacher. This is a provision for those pupils who are less fluent.
Comprehension strategies such as the activating prior knowledge, prediction, literal / inference questions, clarification, ordering of information /events and summarising are taught discretely and are practised in context in all subjects across the school in appropriate key stages.
All children are expected to read at home and take home a reading book. There is an expectation that this is recorded in their reading diaries. In EYFS and KS1, book banded titles are closely matched to children’s phonic abilities and are then used within reading groups and for home reading to ensure children take home a book that is right for their level of reading. In KS2, books are levelled by age-appropriateness and text difficulty and children freely select a book of their choice. Teachers monitor choices to ensure texts are appropriate for ability and challenge. In addition to this, pupils also take home a school library book of their choice.
In EYFS and KS1, we use a systematic synthetic phonics programme called ‘Floppy’s Phonics’ which is supported by a comprehensive scheme of reading books in Reception. All children have daily phonics or spelling sessions where they participate in speaking, listening and reading activities that are matched to their current attainment. In EYFS and KS1, all children read daily during Phonics, English lessons and in other curriculum areas.
Through reading independently, guided, shared and paired reading, children learn to read with confidence, fluency and understanding.