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At Milnrow Parish, we love to read! We aim for our children to be ambitious about their reading and cherish not only their own reading skills but the memories and the experiences that reading brings. Reading for pleasure (RfP) is at the forefront of our school: we aim for raise the enjoyment of reading across and beyond our school. Our Reading Ambassadors support our school's vision and work tirelessly to promote a love of reading. Our staff also possess a HUGE love of reading which enables us to be the best role models to our pupils. We focus on our social reading environments, continuously developing how these are used to support RfP. We ensure that informal book talk is part of our school’s culture with pupils, staff and parents. Furthermore, we understand and support the practice of reading aloud but also independent reading.
Our English curriculum has been constructed so that our children are presented with a wide range or texts and authors. They study these texts and develop an understanding of language and author’s style whilst also journeying through plots, characters and themes. We use Accelerated Reading as a tool for our children to continue to read for pleasure but develop their understanding.
We develop our children’s reading skills progressively from their phonetical understanding to their independent reading skills; our aim is to always make reading memorable and purposeful. Pupils are encouraged to read a varied selection of texts including fiction, non-fiction and poetry. We have continued to provide more opportunities for our pupils to develop their love of reading through performance, reading areas, Story Time and Friday Fiction.
Reading Curriculum Intent
Our reading structure and curriculum stimulates a love of reading and a love of learning; we strive to promote confident, fluent readers who enjoy this experience. Our pupils are inquisitive readers who look forward to their reading sessions in school . This inspires our children to develop a love of reading outside of the classroom. Their knowledge and discussions both in and outside of lessons drive their learning and therefore their progress; we believe that giving our pupils the necessary reading skills will not only enable them to succeed in school but offer them greater opportunities for later life. We focus on the children not only developing their learning but applying this independently too. The teaching of reading and structure has been carefully constructed in every year group in order to empower and develop our pupils understanding: skilled word reading and confident comprehension are the two key components that drive our teaching. We focus on phonics in the early teaching of reading so that our children can confidently decode familiar and unfamiliar printed words. Successful comprehension derives from the understanding of language. In every year group, we aim for the pupils to discuss and apply their skills with not only their teacher but their peers through the exposure to engaging and ambitious texts and extracts. For our pupils to appreciate reading, we ensure that they experience a range of texts (fiction, non-fiction and poetry) and a range of modern and classic authors.
Reading Curriculum Implementation
At Milnrow Parish, we promote effective reading and analysis of texts. Our approach to reading is centred around children being confident readers and having excellent comprehension skills. In early reading, we develop skilled word reading through daily reading and phonics sessions. We follow Read, Write Inc. by Ruth Miskin; we believe that this provides a strong foundation upon which to build excellence in comprehension. In early reading, our pupils gain a greater understanding of what they are reading with the daily practise of sounding out, blending and sight reading. Furthermore, our children's skills and confidence is developed so that they can become effctive storytellers. For further information on early reading and phonics, please scroll to the bottom of the page.
Reading comprehension is taught and developed by teaching pupils specific strategies that allow them to both check and challenge their understanding. We use the RAMP (Reading and Modelled Practice) iapproach to reading in KS2; this focuses upon: predicting, clarifying, questioning, inference and summarising. We believe that these key skills underpin the knowledge of confident readers, therefore, our RAMP approach allows children to perfect and develop their understanding.
Reading Curriculum Impact
At Milnrow Parish, we use formative assessment methods daily to thoroughly assess what the children know. As topics and units progress, the data informs teachers’ future planning, both short-term and long-term. These formative assessment strategies then inform summative assessment judgements.
Summative assessment is carried out in a number of ways: for children who are accessing the RWI programme, an assessment is carried out each half term so that we can understand their phonetic knowledge. This data informs both our groupings our pupils and our future planning.
A STAR (Accelerated Reading) assessment is carried out four times a year and a summative assessment in reading is carried out every term. The STAR reading assessment provides pupils with a reading age and a ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) which allows us to not only track progress and identify target pupils but accurately assign reading books to children. This use of assessment is carried out in year 2-6.
We use formal testing three times a year in years 1-6, which provide us with a scaled score for pupils. From this score, we can continuously track our pupils ensuring they achieve their maximum potential.
The summative assessment provides teachers with trackable data; this is also informed by teachers’ use of formative assessment.
Reading is monitored continuously through staff and pupil voice, learning walks, formal observations, planning and book scrutinies. All this information is reviewed and used to develop and adapt the reading curriculum.
