Reading Curriculum
‘When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.’
James Earl Jones
Intent
At South View Community Primary School, reading is at the heart of our curriculum. We value reading as a key life skill and are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers. We believe that reading is key for academic success and progress in a number of curriculum areas.
Our reading curriculum is designed and taught to ensure all children:
- Develop the skills necessary to read with speed, accuracy, and expression.
- Foster the habit and a real love and thirst of reading, for both pleasure and information.
- Read widely and often, acquiring a wide vocabulary they would rarely hear or use in their every day lives.
- Obtain skills necessary to understand the deeper meaning of texts.
- Gain knowledge across the curriculum.
Implementation: Our Pedagogy in Teaching Reading Skills
The teaching of reading is one of the most important aspects of our provision for children at South View. We understand that being able to read supports children in their ability to learn and develop in all other areas of the curriculum and is a fundamental skill for life.
Children are involved in dedicated reading lessons each week, in addition to their English lessons. We take a whole class reading approach for these lessons during which teachers focus on a high-quality core text and use this to explicitly teach the skills of reading (outlined in the National Curriculum).
At South View, in Key Stage 2, we use 'Steps to Read' as a planning support for Whole Class Reading through carefully crafted units of work. These units of work also help us to provide curriculum knowledge for foundations subjects. They empower teachers to teach all aspects of word reading and comprehension through high-quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts.
Steps to Read provides a clear teaching sequence for reading sessions that explicitly teaches reading skills and strategies in a cumulative way through evidence-based approaches. These comprehensive units have been constructed so that the entire statutory curriculum for reading is covered in Key Stage 2.
Across each term, children will be exposed to non-fiction, poetry or plays and fiction. The texts chosen will be of a reading level beyond that which the child can independently read, so they are being introduced to vocabulary, sentence and text construction which will stretch and challenge them as readers whilst being supported by the teacher.
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6
Impact
As a result of our high-quality curriculum design for reading, children make at least good progress in reading from their starting point.
However, as we believe that reading is key to all learning, the impact of our Reading Curriculum goes beyond the result of statutory assessments.
The impact of our Reading Curriculum ensures children have the opportunity to enter the wide and varied magical worlds that reading opens up to them. As they develop their own interest in books, a deep love of literature across a range of genres, cultures and styles is enhanced.
Our children will become fluent and confident readers who can use their reading skills as a key tool to unlock learning in all curriculum areas, and as a result, know more, remember more and understand more.