Our Learning Journey in Reading
Our Vision for Reading
Fluent reading is a pathway to so many aspects of life and learning. It helps to promote the acquisition of vocabulary so that in both speech and writing, there is richness and understanding. Reading enables children to develop familiarity with a wide range of sentence structures and we are pleased when our children make links with what they read in their writing. It allows them to nurture their imaginations and open their minds to a world of possibilities! As well as enabling pupils to acquire knowledge and to build on what they already know, reading has a vital role to play in giving pupils a chance to develop socially and emotionally. As a result of all this, helping to promote children’s enjoyment in reading and to develop reading for pleasure is clearly a high priority. We aim for children to develop good reading habits, an interest in, and love of reading and texts and a view of reading in which they come to recognise the emotional, intellectual, social, cultural and spiritual benefits of reading. We expect our children to appreciate that reading is a life-enhancing skill which will enable them to take a full place in the society in which they live.
You can find out more about our vision for reading here.
In Early Years (the Reception year), the curriculum is organised along broad themes. You can see what reading looks like in Class 1 here.
You can find the expectations (from the National Curriculum) that children in each year group should be working towards and achieving by clicking on each number below:
1 2 3 4 5 6
Our Partnership with Parents and Carers along the Journey
We really appreciate just how helpful your support can be to help your child along their reading journey. We have created an excellent booklet of advice: Helping your Child with Reading: A Handbook for Parents. Do click to read it - and we are always happy to answer questions.
Parents often comment on how tricky it can be to find reading material for their children. With this in mind, a monthly 'Awesome Eight' (or recommended reads for ages ) can be found by clicking on the Awesome Eight tab. This really is only a guide and your child may well enjoy books from those recommended for a different age group and of course, these books are only a small sample of the huge range of great books available.
We recommend looking at VIPERS for KS1 or KS2 to help ask the right sort of questions when reading with your child. VIPERS stands for:
Vocabulary
Inference
Prediction
Explanation
Retrieval
Sequence or Summarise
There are some excellent websites that follow which will help with book choices too and there are many opportunities online to read extracts from books before buying:
www.lovereading4kids.co.uk
This is a really useful website. You can just look up books for a particular age group or search for a particular book. In both cases, extracts are available to read. Each month, it lists a selection of new books. There is lots of other information here as well as a ‘kidszone’ and competitions.
www.booktrust.org.uk
Another fantastic website for gathering information and searching for book recommendations for your child/children. This site also produces new book recommendations every month. It has just issued a 100 great books from 2020 covering all age groups.
www.booksfortopics.com
Again, a very useful website for finding book recommendations across a whole range of ages and genres.
www.worldbookday.com
Not, as you might think, just for World Book Day! It’s a good idea just to explore it.