Reading
INTENT
Reading plays a fundamental role in education and society. At Cheadle Heath Primary, we want all pupils to become confident, fluent readers who develop a love of reading. We provide children with high quality texts and opportunities to practise a range of reading skills to support them in building their knowledge of the world, vocabulary and ability to decode, understand and enjoy prose, poetry and non-fiction.
We aim for children to become confident in:
foundational knowledge including phonological awareness, letter-sound correspondences (phonics) and recognition of high frequency words
reading with fluency, meaning reading with accuracy, automaticity and prosody (expression/pace)
using contextual cues, background knowledge and strategies to identify and determine the meaning of new/unfamiliar words and phrases
retrieving information from a wide range of fiction and nonfiction texts
making inferences by using their background knowledge and drawing on implicit information in the texts
understanding the choices authors make and why they employ particular words, phrases and sentence structures
understanding how and why different genres and text types are structured differently
reading diverse texts and drawing insights from texts that help them consider different cultures, histories, perspectives and voices
forming, summarising and sharing their opinions of texts
transferring reading skills to other domains, including other curriculum subjects or reading outside of school.
IMPLEMENTATION
In lessons, we explicit teach new knowledge and vocabulary so pupils understand new words and the context of what they’re reading. We model reading to children and ask lots of questions to check and consolidate understanding. We provide opportunities in lessons for pupils to develop their fluency through a variety of repeated and assisted reading strategies. Each week, we spend time modelling, learning and practising different reading skills such as summarising, predicting or making inferences. As children move through the school, they continue to refine their reading skills through engaging with increasingly challenging and varied texts, leaving us ready for their next stage of education.
To ensure reading breadth and progression, we have a reading scheme with levelled books available in our school. Reading schemes are structured sets of books that grow gradually more challenging over time. Children begin reading on a particular ‘book band’ (level) and when they are assessed as ready to, they move to the next book band. Most schemes are very phonic-based at the beginning. Children will take two books home each week – one from a reading scheme for your child to read to you and one chosen by the child for you to read aloud to/with them, or, for older pupils, to read by themselves. Reading for both pleasure and purpose is important and we encourage you to help your children to increase the challenge and variety of books they choose.
Key features to our approach to the teaching of reading include:
Three reading lessons with a single focus text per week
Both background knowledge and key vocabulary (Tier 2) are taught explicitly with opportunities for pupils to demonstrate newly acquired knowledge and application of new vocabulary
Teachers model reading and explore language, prosodic features (e.g. intonation, emphasis, pace) and structure of texts with pupils
To develop fluency, pupils will reread texts alongside an adult, in pairs and independently and will demonstrate comprehension through answering questions.
Each week, the lesson sequence will include focus skill identified by the teacher as one needing more deliberate practice and support. Teachers will model and practise these skills with pupils. This may be a broader reading skill (e.g. making inferences, predicting) or may focus on something more specific (e.g. true or false question structures).
Where a child is struggling to secure foundational skills and/or fluency, we provide additional practice and support to ensure all pupils are able to participate successfully in lessons.
IMPACT
Through our focus on both knowledge and skills, our reading programme supports pupils in developing the mental models and skills required to become competent, active and reflective readers. We not only want pupils to develop a love of reading, but to understand the crucial role reading plays in learning about and understanding the world they and others participate in.
Over time, pupils will become more fluent and confident readers with an increasingly secure ability to comprehend, infer, summarise, predict, evaluate and form opinions. We assess continuously through informal assessments in class and formally through termly summative assessments. Where children are not meeting age-related expectations, additional support is offered in class and in extra sessions to ensure all pupils make strong progress.