Reading at Thorpepark

Throughout the curriculum we aim to ensure that all children become competent, confident and life-long readers. As a school, we recognise that reading underpins all other learning and is a crucial skill required to give our children the best start in life.

Intent

At Thorpepark Academy, we provide an engaging, high-quality reading curriculum that will equip all pupils with the skills they need to be accurate and fluent readers. We ensure that learning to read is prioritised when pupils join the school and that these skills are developed year upon year.

In addition to children’s precise word reading capabilities, we ensure that insightful comprehension is gained through developing the key reading skills that underpin Thorpepark’s reading curriculum. These skills include:

• Predicting
• Clarifying
• Inferring
• Questioning
• Thinking
• Summarising

Our reading curriculum aims to lay the foundations for the children’s future and our philosophy is that pupils will learn to read, in order to read to learn. Gaining these fundamental skills will allow our pupils to become enthusiastic, effective and critical readers.

Through interactive, fun and stimulating lessons, the children will follow a robust phonics programme (Little Wandle) to develop their early reading skills. The school uses phonic units that children progress through as their phonic knowledge grows. Fully phonically-decodable books are provided to ensure that children can apply their existing knowledge with confidence. Once pupils have worked through all phonic units, benchmarking assessments are used to assess children’s word reading and comprehension abilities which ensures that the books they read independently are providing appropriate challenge.are providing appropriate challenge.

Our engaging reading curriculum, aims to inspire children to develop a genuine and long-lasting love of reading. The use of quality texts, detailed on each year groups literacy spine, ensures that children are exposed to high quality literature and vocabulary from a young age. Literacy spines also ensure progression throughout the curriculum and exposure to a broad range of genres, authors and text types.

Through guided reading sessions, pupils in KS1 upwards will be given the opportunity to unpick the language, characters and content of different reading material. They can share their ideas and thoughts with one another, as well as ask and answer questions to deepen their understanding.

Implementation

Children at Thorpepark are exposed to quality books and text from the day they start to the day they leave. Reading is a life skill that we believe every child will learn and develop at our school. We embed a culture of learning to read and then reading to learn.

What does it look like in the classroom?

We teach phonics daily in the Reception and Year 1. Phonics is taught from the first day in recaption. By following Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, we are able to ensure our pupils build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.

As part of this approach, we use Collins Big Cat for Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised phonically decodable books that have been specially designed to match the teaching and learning of the phonics programme. These books are carefully and precisely matched to the child’s secure phonic level to ensure a reading fluency level. This automaticity allows the child to then focus on what they are reading and their understanding of what they have read. These books are read in school three times before they are shared at home with parents and carers.

Any pupil who needs additional practice has daily keep-up support, taught by a fully trained adult. Keep-up sessions match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures and resources, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every pupil secures their learning.

We timetable daily phonics lessons for pupils in Year 2 who are not fully fluent in reading, have gaps in their phonic knowledge or have not passed the Phonics Screening Check (taken at the end of Year 1). These pupils urgently need to catch up, so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen. We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach to these. If any pupil in Year 3 to 6 has gaps in their phonic knowledge when reading, we plan phonics ‘catch-up’ lessons to address specific reading gaps. These short, sharp lessons last 10 minutes and take place at least three times a week.

Book Spine

We want to promote quality literature in all classrooms. At Thorpepark we have a book spine per year group to ensure children have access to a range of authors, poets and playwriters.

Thorpepark is also a member of the school library service which gives the school access to an array of resources such as, class texts, resource boxes, topic boxes, story sacks and book club in a bag. This subscription also enables the school to have access to author visits, Big Malarkey Festival and staff training.

Parental engagement

Thorpepark promotes reading at home and encourages children to read as often as possible. Each child has their own reading record where reading is tracked and communicated back to the teacher. Parents are encouraged to join their child in ‘stay and play’ sessions focusing on reading, phonics and mark making.

To promote reading at home in EYFS and KS1 we have launched ‘Bedtime Reading’. Every child can loan a book and a cuddly reading buddy to read at bedtime.

Thorpepark’s 101 books

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” Dr. Seuss

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