Reading

At Primrose Hill, we believe that the ability to read and interpret written language is fundamental to pupils’ development to enable them to become independent learning during their time at school and beyond. Reading is the key to success and has a direct effect upon progress in all areas of the curriculum.

Aims

We aim for all children, by the end of Year 6 to:

• Become fluent, confident and independent readers
• Read for pleasure and enjoyment as well as information
• Read and respond to a wide range of different types of literature
• Understand the layout and how to use different text types
• Understand and apply their knowledge of phonics and spelling patterns and use this to decode words with accuracy
• Build their bank of sight words to enable fluent reading
• Develop a rich and varied vocabulary
• Understand, respond and appreciate literature drawn from a range of cultures and literary heritage
• Have enough experience with books to be able to draw comparisons, find similarities, differences and discuss enjoyment

Teaching Skills

At Primrose Hill, along with listening to readers and assessing their reading fluency, we will also teach different skills to enable children to understand, respond and analyse different texts.
By the end of Year 6, the following skills will be taught in whole class reading lessons through different text types involving both fiction and non fiction (see progression map for further breakdown):

• Retrieval
• Inference
• Summarising
• Predicting
• Language
• Comparisons

Reading for Pleasure

At Primrose Hill, we encourage and prioritise reading for pleasure. We want to ensure that all our pupils have had the opportunity to read, enjoy and appreciate a wide variety of literature. To address this, we have invested heavily in an engaging reading scheme that will run throughout school all the way up to Year 6. Children will still have the opportunity to choose their own books to read alongside this for their own pleasure.

Each class also will have the opportunity to read a variety of books throughout the year as a class. These books can be found on our overview. This will broaden our pupils reading diet, allowing them to access books that they might not necessarily choose themselves.

Reading Lessons

Story time- Each class will read a whole class novel for 10 minutes at the end of each day. The teacher will model fluent reading or an audio book will be followed. The child will follow the story with their own copy of the novel. Reading discussions will take place around the book being read, allowing pupils to engage with the text and understand it.

Whole class reading lessons- Children will be taught skills linked to reading (see progression map). Some skills will be repeated to ensure that pupils can embed and master those skills. (New skills being taught that half term are highlighted in yellow on the map). A new skill will be introduced weekly and throughout the week, children will have the opportunity to practice this skill through the reading of short and long texts. Each half term, there will be a ‘Read and Discuss’ Unit which will allow pupils to explore class novels and carefully chosen texts further by implementing a variety of skills.

Project X Reading Scheme- Children will be assessed and allocated a book from the relevant book band. Books will be changed on a weekly basis, with the expectation that pupils read at a minimum of 4 times in a week at home with an adult. This will be encouraged through class dojo. Reading records will be checked weekly.

In school, there will be daily and frequent readers on a 1:1 basis with the teacher or support assistant. Targeted pupils will read more often, whilst confident readers may read to an adult once a week.

Daily phonics lessons in EYFS and KS1. Targeted interventions for the pupils that need further phonics in KS2.

KS2 will teach spellings for e.g root words, suffix, prefix.

Reading of texts will be linked to curriculum work where possible.

At least one library visit or librarian visit per year (not taking place in the year 2020-21 due to COVID restrictions).

Other Information

School has opened its own bookshop. This will enable parents and children to buy discounted books to read at home. The money raised through this will then be used to further enhance the reading provision in school.

The school will hold a ‘Big Book Swap’ to encourage reading further.

The Autumn term saw the first set of Reading Catch Up tuitions take place. 24 members of our own staff led these sessions and 104 pupils were able to benefit from this. Further Reading catch up sessions will be planned later this year.