We consider reading to be the most important life skill that we can teach. In learning how to read, the importance of reading and a love of reading, children will be supported in developing skills and understanding in all other curriculum areas, expanding their potential to succeed in life exponentially.

We use the National Curriculum age related expectations and objectives to ensure children acquire age related expectations in Reading, by the time they leave Primary education, wherever this potential is possible.

In the first instance, we aim to ensure children acquire skills in phonological awareness and how to apply this to decode and gain fluency in reading. Increasingly, children will need to be given skills to comprehend what they are reading, interpret texts and find information, developing an awareness of authorial intent, genre purpose and literary devices used for effect. Alongside these skills in reading fluency and comprehension, children, most importantly, should be given desire and the passion to read, so as to motivate and extend their reading, acquiring excellent reading habits that will support them beyond their 7 year journey with us.

To do this, we will teach the underlying skills of reading, such as phonics, and also study a range of excellent quality, interesting fiction and non-fiction texts, paper and electronic, from a variety of genres, with which to apply skills such as phonics, graphic and syntactic and contextual comprehension. Children will have the opportunity to read newspapers, magazines, big books, posters, ICT based texts, advertisements, large texts, information booklets, alongside reading schemes and our extensive library of popular and quality fiction and non-fiction texts.

(Please also refer to the Reading Procedure for full details of how this is delivered across the school).