English - Reading
When they had read it, they rejoiced because of its encouragement.’
Acts 15:31
Reading Intent
Reading is a skill essential for life. At Holy Family we aim to foster in each child a love of books and reading, as well as develop a growing ability to read fluently, confidently and with understanding. We strive to improve and extend each child's skills in reading while also nurturing their love of reading for pleasure. We understand that if children have a positive start with early reading and phonics it will have endless benefits across all areas of the children’s learning and we aim to enable all children, regardless of background, ability or additional needs, to flourish to achieve their very best.
Children will:
- Have access to a rich and varied range of high quality texts for both study and pleasure.
- Understand that in the early teaching of reading, knowledge and skills of phonics is essential to develop fluency and accuracy.
- Explore extensive and rich vocabulary which will in turn lead to an excellent comprehension of texts across the curriculum.
- Foster a love of reading throughout the school whilst encouraging opportunities in reading for pleasure and to nurture our children to become lifelong readers.
- Build upon each child’s skills, knowledge and understanding to extend and expand their reading ability to prepare them for the next stage in their education.
Reading Implementation
All our classes follow a structured approach to reading activities. Reading sessions are interactive and teachers facilitate speaking and listening opportunities, with the children working individually, in pairs, groups and within the whole class.
Our whole school reading overview can be found here.
Individual Reading Books
Regular reading at home is an important tool in developing reading skills. All reading books assigned to children on their phonic journey are fully decodable books to ensure that the children are able to apply and consolidate the skills they have learnt in their phonics lessons and early reading sessions to reading a book fluently and independently.
Staff monitor children’s progress through the use of rigorous assessment to determine next steps to develop skills. The assessment provides staff and children with the knowledge of when best for them to move onto the next phase/level. The varied texts available ensures that the children are exposed to a range of titles and reading with the children and questioning them on the texts, make certain these texts have been understood.
In Key Stage 1: we match the individual reading books to the children’s phonic ability in line with our Early reading and phonics scheme - LIttle Wandle. This helps to ensure development of the children’s fluency is practised.
In Key Stage 2: Until children are fluent readers, books are matched to their phonic ability, as with KS1. All fluent, independent readers will have an individual reading book that they will bring home each day, from a large selection of high quality texts.
We ask that parent’s encourage their children to read at home with them on a daily basis, regardless of their year group. Reading aloud and sharing books with them allows the children to apply their skills to decode a text. Recording of any reading is recorded by both parents and teachers and can be tracked to ensure all children are being given the opportunity to read.
Class Readers
All teachers share a daily 'Class Reader' book with their children to further develop reading for pleasure. We use a reading spine to choose these quality texts, as well as some titles selected by the children, to ensure that the children experience a wide variety of authors and genres. At times, these books may also link to areas of the wider curriculum. All carefully selected books expose the children to a wealth of high-quality vocabulary, which can open up the opportunity for deeper, meaningful discussions.
Children also have access to an e library at home and books are allocated by the class teacher that specifically match the children's phonic ability.
Group Reading
EYFS and Key Stage 1 –Practice reading sessions are linked to the children’s Phonics ability and taught in line with our Early Reading and Phonics scheme - Little Wandle. practice reading sessions take place three times weekly and follow a systematic approach to reading. The 3 sessions cover decoding, prosody and comprehension. Within the sessions, the children will recap GPCs (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence) look at focus or tricky words from the text and discuss these, as well as using there phonic/reading knowledge to read the text. The children will be asked questioned about the text, to check their understanding of what they are reading.
Guided Reading KS2
In Key Stage 2, we follow a whole class approach to teaching guided reading, and this is taught individually for one hour a week, over two sessions. Texts used cover a variety of genres including Fiction, Non-fiction, songs and poetry, as well as web pages and news items. This is planned on a 2 year cycle allowing a range of text types to be continually revisited. The children first explore the vocabulary that will need to be understand the text. This is discussed and then the teacher models how to read the text with prosody. Throughout the teaching sequence, the children have opportunities to read aloud and answer different comprehension questions including: Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval, Sequence of summarise (VIPERS). These skills are developed through different question types and activities that are presented one at a time and take three forms: individual thinking, partnered talk and solo work.
These reading sessions are accessible for all children due to the focus being on the comprehension. Children are able to experience texts that they may not be able to read independently but could enhance their Topic or Science knowledge (as we try to link the texts through out our curriculum).
Please take a look at the KS2 VIPERS Reading Skills link below as these pose the questions that you might ask your child when you are reading with them and want to focus on a reading skill.
Our Year 3 and Year 4 Guided Reading overview can be found here.
Our Year 5 and Year 6 Guided Reading overview can be found here.
Reading Corners
All classes have access to a range of high-quality texts in their book corners that children have access to at all times.
Reading Impact
The impact of our Reading curriculum is measured in a variety of ways. Summative assessments are used across the school, to enable the children’s progress and attainment to be monitored. PIRA Reading Assessments are used from Year 1, to evaluate children’s word reading and reading comprehension at least three times a year. Additionally, Little Wandle has an ongoing assessment, which follows the child throughout their Phonic journey, from their Early Years through to them becoming fluent, independent readers. This assessment provides accurate robust real time data, which feeds into the allocation of their home reading books.
In addition to this, work throughout the term is assessed to inform our teachers of the children’s next steps and successes. Daily, on-going assessments, combined with AfL strategies, provide instant feedback to children, enabling the teachers to ensure progress within the lesson and within units of work.
Through the teaching of systematic phonics and reading enquiry, our aim is for children to become fluent and confident readers who can apply their knowledge and experience to a range of texts through the Key Stage 2 curriculum. We promote reading for pleasure as part of our reading curriculum and strive to encourage children to share and develop their own deeper love of reading.
As a Year 6 reader, transitioning into secondary school, we aspire for our children to be fluent, confident and able readers, who can access a range of texts for pleasure and enjoyment, as well as use their reading skills to unlock learning and all areas of the curriculum. We firmly believe that reading is the key to all learning and so the impact of our reading curriculum goes beyond the results of the statutory assessments.
Curriculum Documents
Holy Family Whole School Reading Overview - Our whole school reading overview showing all of the key texts that are covered from EYFS to Year 6.
Reading Progression of Skills Map
Reading at Holy Family
Visiting Author - Stuart Gould
On Tuesday 5th March author - Stuart Gould will be visiting Holy Family. He will read his book 'Nuts' to all the children. There will also be a chance to purchase a signed copy of Stuarts book afterschool on Wednesday 6th January. More information to follow.
World Book Day 2024
Reading Breakfast
The children and parents enjoyed coming to school in their PJs to promote bedtime reading. A lovely morning was had by all, as families enjoyed spending time together reading, exploring new books while eating a lovely bacon roll.
March 2024 Reading breakfast
Visiting Author - Stuart Gould
The children rally enjoyed our visiting author Stuart Gould sharing his book 'Nuts'.
Many children joined Stuart in his book signing event the following day, where the children shared with Stuart who their favourite characters were in the story , and who they thought might have stolen all the nuts.
Visiting Author - Stuart Gould - Book signing
