Our Reading curriculum is taught weekly, utilising resources from ‘Grammarsaurus: Comprehension Crusher’ with staff using their professional judgement for the length of these lessons based on a range of factors including the age and stage of the pupils, the intended learning activity and the other areas of English that may have been covered that week. Teaching staff also use Assessment for Learning to make adaptions to the sequences of learning where required. Our Phonics & Word Reading curriculum, and this Reading curriculum, intend to ensure pupils are able to decode and read words accurately; become fluent readers and have the knowledge and skills to comprehend what they have read to gain a deep understanding of it.
A long-term plan for our Reading curriculum has been created which ensures that the National Curriculum is taught in a progressive manner that builds on prior skills and knowledge in a sequential manner.
We will implement our Reading Curriculum by ensuring lessons have a specific skill or knowledge focus that builds on their prior learning. We have also trained staff to include key elements of what we believe to be effective Reading teaching which has been used to create our ‘Reading lesson structure’ taught as part of a 2-week sequence of learning (6 sessions) with the following aims:
1) To ensure the children have the world and word knowledge required to understand the text.
2) To read the text and combine the previous session’s learning to develop a deeper understanding of the text.
3, 4 & 5) To develop reading fluency and for modelling and application of comprehension (I do, we do, you do)
6) Pupils independently apply their knowledge of the text type and the skills they have been taught to an unseen text.
As referenced in the DfE Reading Framework 2023, the leaders at Crescent Primary School know they “need to make a difficult decision about whether, during this*(comprehension) session, the time might be better spent teaching *them to read.” As a result, when implementing our Reading curriculum, teaching staff know they may need to make adaptions to sessions 3,4,5 and 6 to ensure pupils who cannot yet decode accurately, spend these sessions being supported to develop this further, utilising the skills taught in their phonic intervention. We make use of a diagnostic assessment tool to help identify if pupils reading below what is expected of their age require word reading, fluency or comprehension support and put in place intervention as required to address this need.
To promote ‘Reading for Pleasure’, all teaching staff from EYFS to Year 6 share a ‘class story’ with the children which is additional to any texts they read in Writing or Reading lessons. These are displayed outside the Head teacher’s office. We also invite authors in to school to share their stories and love of reading, as well as celebrating World Book Day annually.
When we are implementing our Reading curriculum, teaching staff understand the importance of making effective use of formative assessment in inform their teaching.
In short, we believe that “teaching reading is an incremental process in which every lesson is a tiny contribution to something vast”.