Reading

Reading at St Mary's

Our Reading Intent

At St Mary’s, we provide our children with not only a reading curriculum that is varied, engaging and challenging, but also nurture them to appreciate the wonderful opportunities and experiences a love of reading can bring. English and reading lessons are based around high-quality texts and extracts, which helps to nourish our children’s understanding of the world around them. We believe it is important to provide our children with a variety of rich and engaging text types, that often link to their current topic work, as this will support their journey in developing their imagination and reading comprehension skills. We introduce our children to the world of authors, new ideas and imagination at the beginning of their school journey with us and strive to develop these vital skills as they progress through school, to enable them to become accomplished writers.

How do we implement this?

Our school day is based around developing our children's love of reading and the wonderful world of literature. At St Mary's, children have the opportunity to: be immersed in a class novel or text; explore a whole class book in a relaxing environment; read aloud to a familiar adult in school; enjoy some time in our lovely new Reading Room and be excited about our reading challenges and reward systems! 

We continue our celebration of literature through our reading sessions each morning, where we immerse our children into a range of novels and text types, created by different authors. We explore the use of vocabulary and language through these novels and supporting texts: we believe these reading experiences will support our children on their journey to becoming confident, expressive and imaginative readers and writers. 

During reading comprehension lessons, we focus on improving our children's understanding of the content domains. We use the Lexile index of texts to ensure that we are providing each class which the appropriate level of enjoyment and challenge. When sharing a text, adults will model a good level of expression and intonation, in order to encourage the children to do the same, when they begin reading aloud. 

Children at St Mary's are taught to fully appreciate and analyse a text through a range of different strategies and focuses such as: analysing vocabulary used and the purpose of this in the particular text; developing the skills of prediction and summarising; acquiring and then developing the ability to make inferences. 

We understand the importance of children being able to successfully communicate, whether this be orally or through writing. In EYFS, we concentrate on developing our children's speech, language and communication skills before they move on to other aspects of the early years framework. This continues and progresses throughout school as in all our teaching and learning, we aim for our pupils to communicate orally to a high level, therefore we place a lot of emphasis on all forms of speaking and listening.

We strive for our children to enjoy reading for pleasure and thus have implemented weekly reading challenges that our children really enjoy engaging with. The children at St Mary's are currently working on improving our outdoor 'Reading Nook' so we can all enjoy a beautiful, welcoming environment to lose ourselves in the wonderful worlds and stories that have been created for us to enjoy. 

What will the impact be?

 If there is a clear and consistent approach to reading, right from the very beginning of a child’s journey at St Mary’s, we believe that will provide them with all the necessary tools and experiences they need to become confident, lifelong readers. We strive to provide our children with a robust, exciting curriculum that will give them the ability to understand and analyse a text and have strong comprehension skills that will support them on their reading journey. All of our children have the opportunity to leave St Mary’s with a good level of reading skill, which should in turn increase their opportunities, once they leave our school.