Reading

Reading - Curriculum Intent

At Tickford Park Primary School, reading is at the heart of our curriculum. We view reading as an essential, transferable skill for all children. Our aim is to teach children to become confident and competent readers so that they can access texts across the curriculum and in their futures. We aim to foster a love of reading from Foundation Stage through to Year 6 by creating a curriculum that ensures the children have opportunities for reading for practise, meaning and pleasure as well as actively encouraging parents to be involved in their child’s reading journey throughout their time at school.

Implementation

In Foundation Stage and Year 1, we use a validated DFE systematic synthetic phonics programme, called FFT - Success for All. This programme allows our children to develop strong phonetic awareness, effective decoding, blending and segmenting skills. It also builds up the children’s reading knowledge, vocabulary and comprehension development. Each step within the program, has a corresponding GPC(s), a fully decodable phonic reading book and a shared reading book. This ensures that the children can apply their phonetic knowledge as the books link directly to the learning that has taken place in lessons. See website for further information: https://fft.org.uk/phonics/

Reading is explicitly taught through whole class reading lessons from Years 1 to 6 and are structured to allow children to develop as competent readers who can discuss and record their level of understanding of the texts we read. At Tickford Park, our reading curriculum is based on high quality 'core texts' that the children study for a half-term in most cases, getting a deep understanding of the book being studied and encouraging a love of reading that will impact the whole curriculum. The children have daily reading and writing lessons that are all based on the core text so that the essential skills of reading and writing fully complement each other and the knowledge and understanding gleaned from one area of literacy has a beneficial effect on the other. For reading, the learning focuses on embedding the following essential reading skills of: vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval, sequencing and/or summarising.

A list of the core texts we use at Tickford Park can be found in the link at the top of this page.

We encourage children to read at home and in Foundation Stage and KS1, children are given a colour banded, phonetically decodable reading book related to their reading ability. In KS2, the reading books are colour banded by age appropriateness and text difficulty from a range of reading schemes. All children have the weekly opportunity to visit our library to choose a library book to further develop a love of reading.

Reading for Pleasure – Reading for Enjoyment

We recognise that to develop a lifelong love of reading that reading for pleasure should be encouraged, modelled and celebrated across the school. All classrooms make good use of book areas and have inviting book boxes and book shelves to explore. World Book Day is highly celebrated throughout the school, as are a wide variety of fun and engaging activities that promote a love of reading throughout the year, e.g. Book Fairs, Regular Readers, Share-a-Story to name but a few…