Intent

At Cranham, we believe that we must foster a love of books and reading for our children. We know we must immerse our children in books, film and specifically story. Our rigorous approach to the teaching of reading develops fluency, confidence and enjoyment and starts in the early year, where children are taught phonics in a systematic way, which continues throughout key stage 1.

In line with the Education Inspection Framework, this policy, alongside the school’s phonics policy, also places emphasis on how we as a school at Cranham:

1 PRIORITISE reading

2 Develop a LOVE of reading

3 Organise reading (what and by when...Programme and Progress)

4 Do books match sounds?

5 Phonics from the START

6 Ensure that pupils CATCH UP QUICKLY

7 Support Early Reading Experts

Reading

At Cranham, we believe that we must foster a love of books and reading for our children. We know we must immerse our children in books, film, poetry and specifically story. Our rigorous approach to the teaching of reading develops fluency, confidence and enjoyment. During the early years, children will be taught phonics in a systematic way using the Read Write Inc. programme and this continues through key stage 1.

As reading is crucial to the development of writing there are several ways that we teach and expose children to it:

Guided Reading

KS1 – guided reading sessions are taught daily. Our sessions use texts that match the children's phonic knowledge and focus on developing fluency and early comprehension skills.

KS2 – whole class reading sessions take place daily. Our sessions use age- appropriate texts and cover well- known and modern authors as well as literature classics. We use strategies to develop reading fluency and our comprehension skills are developed by exploring Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Summarising.

EYFS – children use texts that match the children's phonic knowledge, developing reading fluency and early comprehension skills.

Home Reading

We value all of the support and time our parents offer their children. We hold reading sessions in school where we explain and show parents how they can best support their children. In EYFS and KS1, our children take two books home a week: a phonetically decodable book to allow them to reread for fluency and apply their phonics knowledge, and a 'book for pleasure' to be shared and enjoyed with family. Reading books are carefully matched to children’s phonic ability and these are checked regularly.

In KS2, children will be able to choose from age- appropriate books, which are banded, and a selection of our 'recommended reads'. Even at this older age, we expect our children to read with an adult at least three times a week to help develop understanding and a pleasure for reading.

Reading Rewards

We have a set of 40- 50 books in every year group that are known as our 'Recommended Reads'. These are age- appropriate and include a range of well- known authors, modern authors and literature classic. Our children will be rewarded for reading these, whether it be independently or with an adult.

Reading into Writing

Every sequence will involve 'reading into writing'. This involves children looking closely at the quality text the class are using for their sequence of learning. They unpick the text, discuss language choices, infer, deduce, retrieve information and look at punctuation.

‘Only by modelling excellent examples can children develop a sense of what the end product might look like and the different ways in which excellence might be achieved.’

Shirley Clarke

Reading at the end of the day

All teachers read to their children for the last 10 minutes of every day. This is to ensure our children are exposed to a wealth of stories.