Reading

Intent

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you'll go" – Dr Suess

At St Martin de Porres Catholic Primary School, we believe that the teaching of reading is integral to a child’s understanding and appreciation of the world around them; a platform that allows our children to see beyond what they know, share in cultural experiences and develop the vocabulary they need to effectively express themselves.

Our reading curriculum strives to foster a lifelong love of reading. We cultivate the behaviours that they will need to be astute readers as they read frequently, are able to use a wide range of strategies, and discuss what they read.

This curriculum is delivered through systematic synthetic phonics, shared and guided reading, home reading, reading across the curriculum, regular opportunities for independent reading, and hearing quality texts read aloud every day. All of these are essential components as they offer the range of opportunities needed to develop fluent, enthusiastic and critical readers.

It is important that children are motivated to read at home regularly; when their reading opportunities increase, so does their fluency and stamina which in turn increases their enjoyment of reading. Therefore, the link between children’s motivation to read and reading for pleasure is reciprocal. Furthermore, we know that reading pleasure is beneficial not only for reading outcomes, but for wider learning enjoyment and mental wellbeing.

We work hard to foster a love of independent reading and build communities of engaged readers. We understand the significance of parents and carers in supporting their children to develop both word reading and comprehension skills so we endeavour to build a home-school partnership which enables parents and carers to have the confidence to support their children with reading at home.

Reading is at the very heart of our curriculum. We are committed to promoting a love for reading and not only giving children opportunities to read in English lessons, but in the wider curriculum too.

At St Martin de Porres Catholic Primary School, we value reading as a crucial life skill. By the time children leave us, we intend for them to read confidently for meaning and regularly enjoy reading for pleasure; be equipped with the tools to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary; and to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose.

Early Reading

Our children make their first steps to success in reading, in our Reception class, where they are introduced to our systematic synthetic phonics programme - Little Wandle Letters & Sounds.

The children are immersed in language through conversation and activities, and are introduced sounds, that will become the essential foundations for reading. They begin with learning the initial letter sounds, and their matching graphemes, and then as they move through Reception into Key Stage 1, they work to learn the 44 sounds and their corresponding graphemes. They will also learn the skill of blending sounds together to help them read CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words initially, building up to blending more complex sounds with 2 (digraph) and 3 (trigraph) graphemes. This continue until they blends sounds with accuracy and confidence.

Implementation

Reading is a key life skill, and we are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers. We believe reading is key for academic success and so, to ensure we have a holistic approach to the teaching of reading.

Reception & Key Stage 1 (Years 1 & 2)

We teach phonics for 30 minutes a day. In Reception, we build from 10-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to full-length lessons as quickly as possible.

Children make a strong start in Reception: teaching begins in week 2 of the Autumn term. We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised expectations of progress.

We teach reading practice sessions three times a week. These sessions are taught by a fully trained adult to small groups of approximately six children.

Each reading practice session has a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory. The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills:

decoding: teaching children to use phonic knowledge to read words
prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression
comprehension: using dialogic talk to help children to understand the text.

Once children can blend, they progress onto decodable books matched to their secure phonic knowledge. In Year 2, we ensure children complete reading the core programme decodable books and move onto chapter books for fluency. Each Fluency reading lesson is 25 to 30 minutes long and is taught by a fully trained adult to small groups of approximately six children.

Home Reading

The decodable reading practice book is taken home to ensure success is shared with the family. Reading for Pleasure books also go home for parents to share and read to children.

Key Stage 2 (Years 3 - 6)

We are committed to fostering a love of reading and developing strong comprehension skills across all pupils. To achieve this, we implement a 'Whole Class Guided Reading' approach that ensures all children have access to high-quality texts and rich discussions.

Aims:

To expose all pupils to age-appropriate, challenging texts.
To develop fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension skills.
To promote inclusive learning through shared reading experiences.

Implementation:

Whole class guided reading sessions are held our times per week, lasting 30 minutes. A high-quality text is selected, often linked to curriculum themes or pupil interests.

Sessions follow a structured format:
- Pre-reading: Vocabulary introduction and prediction activities.
- Shared reading: Teacher-led reading with modelling of fluency and expression.
- Discussion: Targeted questioning using VIPERS (Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval, Summarise).
- Independent tasks: Pupils respond to comprehension questions or complete related activities related to the reading domains that they are targeting (VIPERS).

Reading for Pleasure

We read aloud to children every day. We choose these books carefully as we want children to experience a wide range of books, including those that reflect the children.

Reading for Pleasure books also go home for parents to share and read to children.

Every classroom has an inviting book corner that encourages a love for reading. We curate these books and talk about them to entice children to read a wide range of books.

In Reception, children have access to the reading corner every day in their free-flow time and the books are continually refreshed.

Children choose from our range of carefully chosen books to take home and share with an adult. We keep a record of the children’s choices, so we get to know them as readers.

As children progress through school, we take time to get to know them as readers, and ensure that we engage in meaningful conversations about the books that they have read. By doing this we can recommend authors and genres of books to expand their interests.

The school library is made available for classes to use at protected times. Children across the school have regular opportunities to engage with a wide range of events (book fairs, author visits and workshops, national events, etc.).

Visit from best-selling author - PG Bell

Yearly visit from the book fair!