Reading Curriculum

Reading Intent:

At St Mary’s,  reading is at the heart of everything we do:

  • Our love of Reading opens minds and is the gateway to our future.
  • Teachers are the role models who show children how to read for enjoyment, meaning, and to research.
  • We want children to read with fluency, enthusiasm and to have an informed view about what they have read.

Reading Implementation:

What we do:

At St Mary’s, reading is taught in a progressive and systematic way, beginning in Reception and Year One with the ‘Read Write Inc’ phonics programme and then later through the Book Bands system.

Our reading strategy is based on developing a love of reading through sharing whole class story time on a daily basis, engaging with families and inviting them to read with us, celebrating authors that we love and enjoy and in making recommendations to one another about books we’ve read.  Alongside these strategies to build a passion for reading, we teach reading skills rigorously, so that reading becomes easy for our children to engage with.

Early Reading:

In Reception, Year 1 and the first half term of Year 2, children are taught to read through our Systematic, Synthetic Phonics programme (Read Write Inc Phonics) and they read with their teachers twice a week to develop fluency and comprehension. For children who find reading hard or who fall behind we use a daily read approach and deliver interventions to make sure children catch up.

Years 2 – 6:

Reading lessons are taught daily across the school.  Reading skills are taught under the heading of: Vocabulary, Inference, Predict, Explain, Retrieve and Summarise / Sequence.  These are known in school as VIPERS. Our National Curriculum Progression documents map out which objectives and VIPERS are taught in each year group.

We call our reading teaching approach- Whole Class Comprehension. The sequence of teaching and lessons follows a weekly pattern that supports progress in reading skill as well as enjoyment of great quality texts. Each class reads a chosen text for that week and teachers plan reading activities linked to this text. (We have just completed a school-based trial of a Novel Study approach which we will be rolling out across year 2-6 in the Spring.  This involves children studying a novel together with the same ‘Whole Class Comprehension’ Approach.  We’ve chosen our novels and some of them include: The firework makers daughter by Philip Pullman, October October by Katya Balen and A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll.)

Whole Class Comprehensions and Novel study sequence:

 

Reading Books and Home Readers:

In school group reading: Fluency Reading at home: Family Reading:
Reception Year 1

Year 2 Autumn

 Phonics Matched Books – Read Write Inc and Oxford University Press. Phonics Matched Books – Read Write Inc and Oxford University Press. Free Choice age appropriate reading book. (For adults to read with or to children.)
Year 2 Spring Summer Book banded book at the level for the child, read with teacher on Fridays. Book banded book to take home and read to family. Free Choice age appropriate reading book. (For adults to read with or to children.)
Years 3 – 6 Book banded book at the level for the child, read with teacher on Fridays. Book banded book to take home and read to family or independently.

Key Documents:

Reading National Curriculum Ladders linked to VIPERS
Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 Year 6