The National Curriculum for English states that, ‘Reading widely and often opens up a treasure-house of wonder and joy for curious minds.’
At Wingate Primary School, reading is at the heart of our curriculum. We believe that reading is a vital life skill that supports children’s learning across the whole curriculum. High quality phonics teaching is at the heart of early education, securing the crucial skills of word recognition that, once mastered, enable children to read fluently and automatically. Once children are fluent readers, they are able to concentrate on the meaning of the text and make the shift between learning to read and reading to learn.
By immersing our children in quality texts, we strive to ensure that our children are fluent readers with excellent comprehension skills. We provide a curriculum which is language rich in order to open doors for our children’s futures. It is our intention to ensure that by the end of their primary education, all pupils are able to read fluently, and with confidence, in any subject. We therefore encourage all pupils to read widely across fiction, non-fiction and poetry to develop knowledge of themselves and the world in which they live, to gain knowledge across the curriculum and to instil a love of reading and promote lifelong learning.
Implementation
In Reception, children share books matched to their phonic level and are immersed in a text rich environment. Guided Reading sessions are focused on becoming familiar with books, decoding, fluency and comprehension. Long term planning assigns high quality, fiction, nonfiction and poetry texts to each year group every term throughout the year as well as identifying a range of genres to be covered throughout the year.
Children from Reception to Year 4 take part in weekly Guided Reading sessions with a book matched to their reading ability. Guided Reading may continue in other year groups if it is more appropriate according to the development of the children. The Reciprocal Reading approach is delivered with children as deemed appropriate by the class teacher. In Years 3 to 6, Whole Class Reading takes place daily. In Years 5 and 6, children use Reading Plus, an online reading programme which targets specific areas of reading. In addition to daily English, Whole Class Reading and Guided Reading lessons, reading skills are developed across the curriculum through a wide variety of subjects.
All children are encouraged to read at home with an adult on a regular basis. They have access to books matched to their phonic/reading ability until children become fluent readers and then children are encouraged to select books that they choose to read. Across school our main reading scheme is Bug Club. Children can access allocated, levelled Bug Club eBooks online to read both at school and at home. Children from Year 2 to Year 6 have access to Fiction Express, an online reading platform to further promote reading for pleasure Children in KS2 are encouraged to bring books from home if they wish and opportunities are given daily to read independently.
Our whole school overview for English can be found below.
Bug Club is a finely levelled online reading scheme with interactive activities. Each child has a personalised homepage where they will find the e-Books they’ve been allocated by their class teacher and motivating rewards. This ensures that each child can find a book at exactly the right level for them. The online reading world ensures children can access independent reading resources anywhere at any time. New books will be allocated regularly.
Bug Club books have a fantastic range of titles and within each level, there is a carefully planned progression of books. This fine progression gives children plenty of opportunity to develop their reading skills and master each fine step while moving through the reading programme.
Bug Club login page www.activelearnprimary.co.uk
The school ID is rhrc
Please see the Bug Club Parent Guide videos below for further information on using Bug Club.
For parents: What is Bug Club and what are the benefits?
For Parents: How to use the eBooks
Reading Plus is an adaptive reading solution that integrates comprehension, vocabulary, motivation and reading efficiency into one programme. Reading Plus is used across Upper KS2 to engage and support children with their reading it assesses efficiency, but also measures and increases motivation and comprehension.
Impact
As we believe that reading is key to all learning, the impact of our reading curriculum goes beyond the result of statutory assessments. Children have the opportunity to enter the wide and varied magical worlds that reading opens up to them. Through the explicit teaching of the reading skills, both teachers and pupils assess their learning continuously throughout the lesson. Our assessment systems enable teachers to make informed judgements about the depth of children’s learning and the progress they have made over time.
Reading for Pleasure
“Make Story time at the end of the day a special time, a fun time, devoted entirely to reading . . . No testing, no comprehension, no analysis, no interrogation. Let the children go home dreaming of the story, reliving it, wondering . . . The more time you spend in ‘dream time’ living in your head where the story is, imagining how the people involved would feel – then you can lose yourself utterly in the story.” Michael Morpurgo
At Wingate Primary, ‘Dream Time’ is an integral part of every day. There is an expectation that all teachers will read to their class on a daily basis during ‘Dream Time’. A wide variety of books are chosen to offer children the broadest reading experience possible. Books are chosen carefully and for a number of reasons. We look for books that broaden children’s horizons; deal with sensitive or difficult issues; offer a diversity that our context does not offer and books that are fun, exciting or just wonderful. Children are involved in the selection of their Dream Time book by voting for what they would like to read next.
Some of our favourite recent books to build a love of reading in EYFS and KS1 are:
In KS2, children will enjoy reading some wonderful texts this year during Dream Time.
Reading Ambassadors
Our Reading Ambassadors have the important job of promoting reading for pleasure in school. Ambassadors are chosen by their peers for their love of reading, their willingness to share this passion with others and enthusiasm to promote reading throughout the school.
Here are our Reading Ambassador’s reading recommendations for this half term.
Pupil Voice
“I love reading because it lets me relax and use my imagination. I like using Reading Plus and Bug Club because it helps me learn and get a better range of vocabulary. I think the more people read, the more people will be happy.” Josh
“I like reading because I learn interesting things and it wakes up your imagination. I like to imagine myself in the book.” Emmie
“The whole world of reading is immersive and has infinite possibilities. Reading takes me out of this world into another. The world of reading is really diverse. I’ve never been bored reading a book.” Rowan
Celebrating Reading
