Our Reading
Intent
At Bentley New Village Primary School, we believe that reading is an essential life skill and we are committed to enabling our children to become lifelong readers to ensure the best possible opportunities are available in the children’s future and to allow them to develop the life skills of retrieval, inference and deduction, vocabulary use, summary and prediction.
At the heart of our reading sequence is our drive to foster a love of reading, enriching children’s learning through carefully designed teaching activities that utilise imaginative stories, real life scenarios, emotionally and physically diverse lives, fact and thought provoking texts, whilst also developing each child’s language and vocabulary understanding and use. We strive to raise the importance of reading amongst the community by ensuring our children are reading to parents and carers and we ensure that our parents are aware of the speed of their child’s reading through regular reporting strategies.
Reading is a skill that enables children to develop their learning across the wider curriculum and lays the foundations for success in future lines of study and employment. We recognise the importance of taking a consistent whole school approach to the teaching of reading in order to close any gaps and to target the highest possible number of children attaining the expected standard or higher.
We have high expectations of all children and we encourage them to challenge themselves, show a resilience and determination to succeed and to show creativity and co-operation when working within lessons.
Implementation
As part of this planning process, teachers need to plan the following:
- The first session focussing on reading fluently
- and introducing and incorporating definitions of the New Village 9 reading words for the planning sequence.
- One session building the language and vocabulary skills to define these words. Children will investigate the words looking at meaning, word family, etymology, prefixes, suffixes and using the word in context.
- Session based on the skills of comprehension using a familiar text
- Two sessions follow using assessment for learning to address misconceptions
- Outside of school, children are asked to read 3 or 4 times per week and this is monitored. Communications to parents are made, should we require a change to the reading attainments of the children each week.
- Children’s reading speed is closely monitored and it is reported to parents for support in improving the words read per minute. A further letter is sent reporting the improvements made.
- All or most texts are chosen from the recommended list of KS1 and KS2 reads.
Impact
Our reading sequence is of a high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progression. If children are keeping up with the curriculum, they are deemed to be making good or better progress.
In addition, we measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:
- Words per minute assessment.
- L’exia intervention.
- Weekly readers.
- Daily target readers
- Summative assessments
- Formative notes/assessments
