We Love To Read

	Our library has books for all ages.
	For all things Roald Dahl, click here.
	We use our book bags to take books home each day.

Being able to read well is so important as it enables our children to discover new facts and access the broad, balanced and rich curriculum we offer. Reading well opens our children up to a world of new ideas, stories and opportunities. All of our school staff are committed to ensuring that our children become independent and fluent reader, able to decode, comprehend and express themselves confidently.

Our children’s love of reading is fostered through access to a wide range of stories, poems and non-fiction books, together with carefully selected whole class readers. Texts are chosen from a wide range of authors through time, from classic novels to new releases. Books are used in all areas of the curriculum to help teach specific projects, in addition to broadening children’s social, moral, spiritual and cultural awareness. We inspire children to read, encourage adults read to them on a daily basis and provide opportunities to explore a range of rich and appropriately challenging texts.

Our structured approach to reading is carefully designed to get children reading early and then to continue to make progress throughout their time in school. We use Letters and Sounds to teach phonics across EYFS and KS1 and introduce additional phonic programmes to any children arriving in Key Stage 2 needing additional decoding support. This learning is reinforced through enhancement tasks, songs and fun, with practical activities related to the corresponding letter formation. Children begin their ‘book-reading journey’ with picture books, to encourage storytelling, discussion and develop questioning and prediction skills. Children are continuously assessed and as their segmenting and blending progresses, they are given activities and books to match their learning. These include picture/word matching cards, CVC word books, caption/picture matching cards and the early reading books from our school scheme.

As our children’s reading progresses, we work on developing vocabulary and comprehension skills through structured whole class reading sessions. Activities are carefully planned to ensure that reading stamina develops as children progress through the school. Our class readers ensure that all our pupils are exposed to high quality challenging texts. This allows for an immersion in more sophisticated vocabulary and helps them to build their own vocabulary that will be wider, challenging and more specific. Visiting authors are encouraged and our latest online work with Michael Morpurgo excited and inspired all.

Children could not make the progress they do without support from home, and we work closely with parents to help them understand how to pronounce the phonics correctly and inform them of strategies to develop their child’s reading skills. As well as our own home reading books, we use the Reading Bug Club online program to develop confident and motivated readers. This online scheme combines hundreds of finely levelled books with interactive eBooks and an online reading world. We work hard to ensure this joy of reading extends beyond the classroom and support, promote and value the contributions that parents and carers make to their child’s reading at home. We give weekly reading awards in each year group, not only to encourage our pupils to read a wide range of literature, but also to share and discuss these books at home. We celebrate World Book Day and have a vending machine full of books to be given as prizes throughout the year.