“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island.” Walt Disney

 

“If you don’t like to read, you haven’t read the right book.” J.K. Rowling

 

 

At Wragby Primary School, we place reading at the heart of our curriculum.

 

 

Reading Intent

 

 

Our aim is to foster a love of reading so that our children choose to read for pleasure.

 

We want to provide our children with the opportunities to become fluent and confident lifelong readers, who find pleasure and purpose in reading and value reading as the key to success.

 

We aim to expose our children to a broad range of texts to enhance the essential knowledge that children need (cultural capital).

 

We are determined that every pupil will learn to read.

 

 

 

 

“When children are very young, you read them books that are positive to help them go to sleep. But there comes a moment when they begin to understand the difficulties of the world. They know there are problems and the books they read should reflect that, not gloss over them.” Michael Morpurgo

 

“I think it’s the books that you read when you’re young that live with you forever.” J.K. Rowling

 

 

Implementation - Guided Reading

 

How the curriculum is implemented- planning, teaching, expectations, delivery

 

 

At Wragby Primary school we are passionate about learning. We follow the latest research about cognitive load, working memory and how children learn in order to reach their full potential. We have written and mapped our curriculum following recommendations from the EEF/scholars including: Coe et al, Rosenshine, Deans, Kirschner et al, Hattie and Clarke and Kalyuga et al. 

 

Reading is prioritised at Wragby Primary School, it is at the heart of everything we do and we understand that reading is the foundation of all learning and knowledge. We understand there are many strands woven into skilled reading. We have separated our curriculum progression documents into the two strands shown in the Scarborough Reading Rope (Gough and Tunmer), with a focus on ‘language comprehension’ once children achieve reading fluency and a greater level of automaticity in ‘word recognition’. 

Once children have cracked the phonics code, which we teach through the systematic synthetics programme Sounds Write, guided reading sessions begin formally in Y2. More specifically, for ‘language comprehension’, our evidence-based approach links John Murray’s Reading Explorers & Reading Aloud materials with the EEF’s Reciprocal Reading Programme. All staff are trained in our reading approach. 

As a school we know that new content needs to build on existing knowledge. Pupils are more likely to learn when new information is sequenced to build on a secure foundation, allowing pupils to strengthen their understanding by enabling links between existing and new knowledge. We appreciate that reading comprehension requires knowledge of vocabulary, context, syntax and narrative structures, as well as the capacity to read fluently. 

Reading at Wragby Primary School is therefore mapped into ‘golden threads’, which are main concepts in reading sequenced progressively and revisited across each year group. We understand that effective teaching focuses on children developing meaning as they read and monitoring their comprehension. We have mapped our ‘golden threads’ of reading into four key areas:

 

• Predict
• Clarify
• Question
• Summarise

 

These are the four reading comprehension strategies taught in the EEF’s Reciprocal Reading Programme, allowing our children to become procedurally fluent and the significant processes involved in comprehension to happen automatically. 

 

Using Reading Explorers with fidelity as our reading programme ensures consistent teaching, using a broad and balanced variety of texts, both fiction and non-fiction. It encourages children to access, interpret and understand what they are reading (knowledge of structures), using increasingly complex, coherently sequenced texts.

Teachers 

and teaching assistants are trained to provide inspirational teaching and personalised support to ensure children reach their age-related expectation. Children working above age-related expectations are also challenged to demonstrate a greater depth of understanding. 

 

Reading Explorers promotes the child's knowledge and understanding of authorial intent and gives the reader the chance to speculate on the tone and purpose of each text, as well as to consider its wider themes and audience. The focus on knowledge of different sentence structures in these sessions enables pupils to read with accuracy and sufficient speed for fluency (syntax knowledge). 

At Wragby we realise skilled reading requires accurate, speedy word reading and good language comprehension. Developing spoken language- including and especially vocabulary- is essential for the academic progress of all of our children. We try to close the language gap that we have identified at Wragby School through a language-rich environment, using carefully selected stories, discussions and poems. In all subjects performance/reading aloud is a key component of our curriculum. In our reading comprehension curriculum our ‘Clarify’ golden thread has a vocabulary focus. In addition to this our key stage two spelling and vocabulary is taught using a mix of Sounds Write materials and Ed Shed. These have a focus on morphology of words, including the meaning of roots, prefixes and suffixes. 

Before every guided read there is a pre-read session. This session gives children the opportunity to discuss wording before the guided reading session. It also allows children to follow a teacher reading fluently using the appropriate prosody as they read. Reading Explorers allows pupils to acquire vocabulary through repeated encounters in texts, however it also maps vocabulary, which is worth teaching explicitly (Tier 2), which is always taught by giving examples of usage rather than giving isolated definitions.  Pre-read sessions also allow our teachers to provide the relevant contextual knowledge that pupils need for adequate comprehension. There is a focus on ‘Predict’ and ‘Clarify’ as a part of our pre-read sessions (although these two ‘golden threads’ still form a vital part of the guided reading session).

On our curriculum mapping we have also identified opportunities to talk about the ‘Protected Characteristics’ and ‘British Values’ within our guided sessions.

Children learn a wider range of poetry by heart, preparing poems to read aloud and perform, showing understanding through intonation, tone and volume so that the meaning is clear to the audience. Children continue to read and discuss an increasingly wide range of fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction and reference or textbooks. They read books that are structured in different ways and read for a range of purposes.