Literacy

Our main reading scheme here at Braehead is Big Cat Readers which provides a progressive, colour-banded reading pathway that helps children develop decoding, fluency and comprehension skills. Teachers carefully matched books with pupils to apply their phonics knowledge, build confidence and develop a lifelong enjoyment of reading.

Big Cat Banding assessments are completed to ensure pupils are ready to move onto the next stage when the time times.

At Braehead, we use Accelerated Reader to encourage a love of reading and help pupils make progress. Pupils in P3-P7 complete a termly comprehension quiz, which identifies an appropriate reading range. They then choose an independent reading book from our library within that range, ensuring they are reading at a level that both supports and challenges them. Alongside this, whole-class and group novels remain an important part of developing reading skills.

At Braehead, we are beginning to use Reading Eggs to support the development of children's early reading skills both in school and at home.

This engaging online programme provides personalised lessons, interactive games and digital books that help children develop phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension at their own pace. 

Through regular practice and motivating activities, Reading Eggs helps to build confidence, independence and a lifelong enjoyment of reading.

As children move through the school, they develop a wider range of reading and comprehension skills. Through discussion, questioning and high-quality texts, pupils learn to retrieve information, make inferences, predict, summarise and explain their understanding. This helps them become confident, fluent readers who can think critically and engage with increasingly challenging texts.

In Primary 6 and 7, children dive deeper into "authors craft", looking what authors in their text and why they do it.

Primary 1

Primary 2

Talk for Writing is an engaging approach to teaching literacy that helps children develop confidence as readers, speakers and writers. 

Through high-quality texts, children learn key vocabulary, language patterns and text structures by speaking and retelling them first. They then adapt these ideas and apply them independently in their own writing. 

This structured, creative process supports children in becoming enthusiastic, skilled and successful writers.

The National Improving Writing Programme, led by the Children and Young People Improvement Collaborative (CYPIC) in partnership with Education Scotland, is a programme designed to improve children's writing skills and attainment. It supports teachers in using proven approaches to help pupils become more confident, successful writers. 

The programme focuses on helping children develop the key skills they need for writing, while ensuring teaching is carefully tailored to meet the needs of each class.