We aim for all children to be able to read with accuracy and fluency as early as possible. Through listening to stories and having access to a wide variety of texts to enjoy, we aim to develop within each child an enduring love of literature that inspires reading for indulgent pleasure, but also to pique their curiosity and grow their awareness.
"To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark."
Victor Hugo
An important part of our reading curriculum that runs throughout every child's time in our school from Reception to Year 6 is our daily Reading for Pleasure sessions. Children enjoy listening to adults read a variety of different texts including fiction, non-fiction and poetry. All the books on our Reading Spine are shared with children in this way, as well as being available to them to choose from our library.
As well as encouraging children to enjoy reading, our curriculum is designed to teach children the skills to become confident and competent readers. To achieve this, children need to develop their skills in two different strands of reading; word reading and comprehension.
Although we continue to develop children's word reading skills further up the school, the majority of word reading skills are learned in the first few years of school. We teach children to read words and begin to develop basic comprehension skills the systematic synthetic phonics programme, RWI (Read, Write Inc) Phonics.
RWI Phonics supports the initial development of basic comprehension skills. When children complete the programme, our reading curriculum is designed to build on from this by teaching children the skills of reading comprehension using Jane Considine's Hooked on Books approach.