Reading

St. Oswald’s Reading Curriculum

Intent

At St. Oswald’s Primary School, we believe that reading is a fundamental skill for life, and teaching our children to become fluent, confident, articulate readers is absolutely integral to what we do. It is our intention that children are able to decode as soon as possible by applying a knowledge of structured synthetic phonics in order to decode unfamiliar words with increasing accuracy and speed. We will support and encourage all children to decode, become fluent, comprehend and enjoy reading and strive to enable good progress through high quality teaching and learning.

We explicitly teach reading skills throughout the school that continually develop children’s understanding and enjoyment of texts. We hope that by teaching the children at St. Oswald’s to read at age appropriate levels they will be able to enjoy books and other written media, to access information, to follow written instructions in all curriculum areas and the environment around them.

We aim to provide children with a literacy-rich environment that promotes a culture of reading, enabling children to become lifelong, confident readers. We want them to read for pleasure, having had access to a wide range of high quality text types, genres and authors in order for them to make informed choices and opinions about their favourites and develop a good linguistic knowledge of vocabulary and grammar.

Home Reading

Reading at home is an essential part of learning to read. We work in partnership with parents, so pupils develop a love of books and reading. We carefully monitor each child’s reading at home using their individual school planners and encourage our parents to be fully active and engaged with us in this in order to support their child’s ongoing development.

How to support your child’s reading at home?

Daily reading practice will help develop children’s decoding and comprehension skills. Although it is not expected that they should read a whole book, children are encouraged to read daily at home for at least 10 – 15 minutes with an adult for fluency and encouraged to discuss their texts. Children will spend longer discussing their understanding of what they have read. Use the pictures, the characters, how they think the story will end, their favourite part etc. and you will then see how well they have understood the content and you will help them develop their comprehension skills.

Encourage your child to read a variety of texts on a regular basis, even taking the opportunities to note and read texts in their environment such as leaflets, shop signs, road signs, information posters, newspapers etc.

Struggling to find a suitable age related reading book? See the document below for recommended reads for each Year group. A copy of this is in the reading area of each class.

There are many Websites available which you can use to support your child to develop their reading:

KS2

https://poetrysociety.org.uk/education/learning-from-home/

The Poetry Society has a range of poems suitable for KS2 –

https://www.roalddahl.com/things-to-do-indoors

Listen to chapters from The Twits, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Witches.

https://www.worldofdavidwalliams.com/elevenses/

Listen to chapters from David Walliams books – Current on is ‘Slime’ (audio by Mr Walliams himself).

https://schools.theweekjunior.co.uk/english-resources

The Week junior has a range of free comprehension activities in their English resources collection.

https://www.derbyshire.gov.uk/leisure/libraries/libraries.aspx