Reading
At Waulud Primary School, we value reading as a key life skill and a source of ongoing enjoyment, and are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers. We believe reading is key for academic success and so place reading at the heart of both our English and our wider curriculum. We believe that reading widely and skillfully will allow our pupils to use, develop and understand new vocabulary and grammatical structures so that their everyday language will be the best that it can be, thus widening and increasing their opportunities in the future
Our broad, balanced and differentiated curriculum combines daily phonics teaching for younger pupils with daily guided reading activities as pupils move through the school. Daily reading sessions are structured carefully so that pupils are taught the key skills of inference and understanding. Pupils are encouraged to choose books for independent reading from a wide range of age-appropriate and high quality modern and traditional texts. All pupils are read to by their class teacher every day from a book on the school’s reading spine, which has been chosen carefully to enhance their exposure to high quality texts. Through the wider curriculum, pupils explore a wide range of non-fiction texts as well as fiction. Each class has a reading area filled with a range of books and providing a comfortable place for independent reading, and older pupils have the opportunity to become reading buddies to support younger pupils with their skills. Parents are actively encouraged to support the reading of their children, and showing them the skills to build their children’s comprehension, is an important focus for the school.
We prepare our Early Years pupils for school readiness by following curriculum guidance set out in Development Matters (see pages 74 to 83).
In Key Stages 1 and 2, we follow the National Curriculum Reading Programmes of Study. These consist of two dimensions:
- word reading
- comprehension (both listening and reading).
Our teaching focuses on developing pupils’ competence in both dimensions.
A copy of the Reading Programmes of Study can be found here. This provides details of the expectations for each year group.
Our Phonics page also provides more information about how we teach ‘word reading’ to pupils across the school.
As well as Whole Class Guided Reading and Phonics lessons, we also have timetabled daily Class Reader time where we read books from our Reading Spine. We understand how important it is that pupils hear teachers modelling how to read high quality texts aloud.
Our Writing Curriculum (based on Talk4Writing) complements our Reading Curriculum by enabling pupils to learn model texts off by heart and gather ideas to use in their own narratives and non-fictional pieces. During the imitation phase of our writing units, pupils have opportunities to explore the features of not just the model text, but also a range of similar, supplementary texts which supports the development of both word reading and comprehension skills.
Our Reading Curriculum Map below, shows how we link our texts together. Reading Spine texts, some PWP (Writing Curriculum) texts and the Whole Class Guided Reading texts are all found on each Year group’s 50 Book Challenge list. We have reoccurring themes that run through our texts to enable pupils to make links and to support pupil understanding and comprehension. We have also chosen texts which make links to our Waulud Values – Pride, Respect, Include, Determination and Encourage.
In the 50 Book Challenge, the children are challenged to read all 50 books picked for their year group. Awards are earned for reading 10, 25 and 50 books. Some books are enjoyed together as a class and some books are read at home.
Click on each year group to see the 50 Book Challenge book lists:
