Promoting a Love of Reading

At South View, we value the importance of developing a love of reading and strive to share the joy of reading with our classes every day. A fifteen-minute ‘story time’ is timetabled at the end of each day across the school.

We believe that one of the most important aspects of reading instruction is text selection, the process by which teachers choose what their children will read. There are five types of texts, which are known as the ‘Five Plagues of Reading’, that our children are exposed to whilst at South View.

 

THE FIVE PLAGUES OF READING

Archaic Texts

Archaic texts are older texts, those written when authors used different words, in different sequences, within different syntactical structures. With each passing year, archaic texts become a little less familiar and a little more distant from the way we write and talk today

Nonlinear Time

Nonlinear texts challenge a reader’s expectation that time elapses in a linear and even manner. These texts force readers to contend with confusing moments when time, or the rate at which it appears to be passing, shifts suddenly and without explanation.

 

Complexity of Narrator

A text’s narrative voice can add to its complexity. It can have multiple narrators, nonhuman narrators, or even unreliable and deceitful narrators. It can have narrators whose role or identity is unclear—is the narrator the author? The challenge that such a book poses should not be underestimated: these texts are tricky and can result in failed comprehension regardless of the degree of a student’s skills.

Complexity of Story (Plot and Symbolism)

Complex stories are disorienting for even advanced readers, as they force the reader to hold a story together even as different plot lines swerve off in different, seemingly unrelated directions. To point out the obvious, following multiple plots and multiple, interwoven plots is harder than following a single plot.

Resistant Text

When authors write resistant texts, they mean for the material to be difficult to understand. To cause a reader to struggle to make sense of a story is to communicate the struggle of making sense of it as a writer. Oftentimes with these texts, gaps in meaning are part of the meaning-making.

South View Community Primary School’s Reading Spine

We have developed a ‘South View Community Primary School’s Reading Spine’ for each year group across the school. The high-quality texts are chosen to ensure coverage and progression of the ‘Five Plagues of Reading’ and are progressive in terms of challenge and content.

EYFS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

KEY STAGE 1

LOWER KEY STAGE 2

UPPER KEY STAGE 2