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.
Phonics & Early Reading

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 ‘Little Wandle’ early reading 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, celerating 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 (Little Wandle) and they read with their teachers 3 times per week to develop fluency, prosody and comprehension. For children who find reading hard or who fall behind we use the ‘Keep Up’ approach (Little Wandle) and deliver interventions to make sure children catch up quickly.   Progress in reading fluency and comprehension in Year 1 and Reception is assessed every half term.

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- Novel Study. 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 book per term and teachers plan reading activities linked to this text. (Some of which include: The firework makers daughter by Philip Pullman, October October by Katya Balen and A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll.)

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 – Little Wandle Phonics Matched book – Wider Scheme 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