Reading
Reading
Curriculum Design at The Gates Primary School
Curriculum Area: Reading
Curriculum Leaders: Mrs Lenagan and Miss Fairhurst
Curriculum Link Governor: Miss Turnock
Our Intent
At The Gates, English is at the heart of what we do and engrained into the school curriculum. We aim to deliver a high-quality English education enabling foundations for every child to become literate, preparing them with the skills for adult life. Through reading in particular, pupils have the chance to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. We recognise that reading is an essential life skill and therefore strive to ensure that every child, regardless of gender, ethnicity or social/economic background, develops the confidence and competence to embrace literature in its many forms. We endeavour to foster passions for lifelong reading for all children and achieve this through engaging all children in high quality learning experiences.
We aim to:
- To provide children with the skills to decode words in order to be able to read fluently with understanding of what they have read.
- To support children to achieve a good understanding of phonics and early reading so they can move on to become confident, independent readers.
- To develop a child’s love of reading through widespread reading for enjoyment.
- To ensure pupils acquire a wealth of vocabulary through exposure to high-quality texts.
- To enable pupils to use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas.
- To have a consistent reading approach throughout whole class reading and phonics sessions to ensure high outcomes.
Our Award Winning Provision for English
Since 2021
The Liverpool Reading Quality Mark is an award created in partnership with the National Literacy Trust, aimed at promoting reading for enjoyment.
Renewed in June 2019
English Enrichment
High quality provision across the school inspiring a love of English
Children receive many opportunities to celebrate and to encourage a love of reading outside of the curriculum.
Children are provided with the opportunity to take part in the 100 Book Challenge; school provides books for children to read at school and at home. The aim is for children to challenge themselves to read books by a range of authors, have access to high quality texts and develop a reading for pleasure mind-set. To ensure that books are age appropriate, a 100-Book Challenge has been created for all phases: EYFS, KS1, LKS2 and UKS2.
During phase assemblies children have Book Talk time to discuss books that they are reading. Reading Buddies are the school Reading Leaders. Their role is to support the KS1 children with their reading and to inspire their peers to read. They have an active website page and Twitter page. Reading bingo competitions are also regularly in place and entries receive a prize and feature on the school website.
To further instil a love of reading, we celebrate different authors by regularly reviewing books, researching authors and illustrators and taking part in national book days such as World Book Day. With so many different book characters filling the school, children are provide with a range of opportunity to discover, share and recommend. Author visits are arranged where possible and children have the opportunity to ask questions to further ignite a passion for reading.
At The Gates, we believe it is important to develop links with the local community through exploring what our community has to offer. This includes inviting Librarians to visit the school to read to the children and raise the profile of the library service.
High quality texts
Throughout their time at The Gates, children will be immersed and will experience a range of genres covering non-fiction, modern and classical poetry and fiction by a range of poets and authors from around the world. These genres will build as they move throughout the school, so that by the end of Year 6, the children are equipped with knowledge and experiences of genres to allow them to select books for purpose independently.
Medium Term Plans have been created to ensure a range of high-quality fiction and non-fiction texts are accessed throughout the year. These plans define the novels we use and ensure an appropriate balance and distribution of work across each term. Each half-term, the class novel links to other curriculum areas such as Science, History, Geography and PSHE. This ensures that children’s learning is further enhanced and their vocabulary broadened.
Reading Buddies
Mission Statement
We promise to work together to help KS1 children so that they improve their reading ability.
Aims
We aim to:
Ensure that everyone will be supported at their level.
Increase everyone's ability to read.
Support the children to develop their confidence.
Our Reading Buddy system is set up to support our younger pupils across the school. During our Reading Buddy sessions, our younger pupils essentially have their own personal tutor helping them with their reading. The older pupils provide immediate feedback and offer strategies to help emergent readers decode unknown words. Other benefits from these system are evident when speaking to our children. Our older children act as role models and improve the confidence of our younger readers whilst they are learning to read, particularly with children who need support with home reading. This system also promotes our key value of enhancing our pupils ‘love of read’.
Additional Policies