Reading

Our Intent
Learning to read is one of the most important things a child will learn at school. Everything else depends on it, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible.

We want our pupils to:

- love reading – and to want to read for themselves. 
- become fluent readers
- develop their comprehension skills to be able to analyse increasingly complex texts. 
- learn from authors techniques and styles of writing to use in their own compositions.

How we Implement our Vision

Early Reading
We start by exposing children to age-related texts right from Nursery, in order to give children the opportunity to learn new vocabulary and to begin their love of reading. Then in EYFS/KS1 we start with Phonics. St Cuthbert’s follows the Letters and Sounds scheme of work, which enables us the flexibility to cater the learning for our pupils. Phonics lessons take place at least three times a week.

Shared Reading
Throughout their school life, children will be given reading books which are designed to develop their reading fluency. Each week each child will take part in shared reading and some will do this daily. The aim of these sessions is to develop their fluency, intonation and their decoding skills. Comprehension homework is then set to focus on retrieval and inference within the text. Children are taught a variety of techniques to find the meaning of unfamiliar words they may come across and their understanding of the text is assessed through shared reading discussions. 


Class Readers and Class Libraries
Teachers regularly read to the children too, so the children get to know and love all sorts of stories, poetry and information books. This helps to extend children’s vocabulary and comprehension, as well as supporting their writing. Each class has a class author and each teacher will ensure that children have been exposed to a variety of texts by their class author. To support this, we actively encourage children to take home books from the class collection or the library that may be of a higher level than they can read on their own. We want children to experience books about all sorts of topics and have the opportunity to share these with parents and families at home.

Comprehension Skills
In guided reading sessions your child will work with children who are at the same reading level.  This is so that the teaching can be focused on their needs.  Some older children will continue to access phonics groups if they need further consolidation and development of reading skills.  We check children’s reading skills regularly so we that we can ensure they are in the right group.  Children will move to a different group if they are making faster progress or may have one-to-one support if we think they need some extra help. 

Cross-Curricular Links
We believe that reading should not only take place in English lessons but in all subjects, we therefore intend to provide our children with the opportunity to access good quality texts in all subject areas. We also invite our children to take books from the school library as well as each class being equipped with age-related texts.

How we measure the impact of our provision

Class Assessments
Throughout the lesson, the teacher will use mini assessments to see which children have grasped concepts covered within the lesson. This assessment is used to inform future planning on what areas of reading comprehension the children need further development in. 

Formal Assessment
One way we measure the progress of children from Year 1 - 6 is to complete termly formal assessments. Children will complete a Reading Paper which tests the children's reading fluency and comprehension skills.  These results are then analysed to assess gaps in children's learning so that targeted intervention can take place. 

SATS
At the end of Year 2 and Year 6 children will complete their SATs. These are national tests which the children complete at the end of each Key Stage to measure long term progress. The children and staff work really hard throughout the year to prepare for these assessments. 

Monitoring
The English Subject Leader will complete termly monitoring in the form of lesson observations, book trawls, pupil voice and assessment analysis to inform actions to be taken to improve the provision the children receive.