Reading

We hope that these reading exemplification materials will help you in planning effective reading teaching, learning and assessment strategies to enable all pupils to reach at least the expected standard for their year group.  These materials should be used in conjunction with understanding how primary schools teach core age related reading knowledge, proficiency, understanding text types, as well as fostering a life long love of reading across the wider curriculum.

Children in Key Stage 1 are taught reading lessons daily, using a combination of the once weekly guided reading lessons and then moving on to whole class reading in the spring and summer term. The focus in year 1 is for the children to decode fluently, therefore teachers ensure the children read daily. Children in key stage two are taught reading daily using the whole class reading approach based on research and studies. A combination of trials conducted across our partnership of schools and good practice seen in other schools led to our whole class reading ethos.

The approach involves daily sessions incorporating whole class modelling, partner work and independent reading to deliver structured daily reading sessions. The whole class reading sessions encompass the key principles of effective reading provision and fully meets the requirements of the National Curriculum. Children record reading lessons in their ‘reading journals’. Snapshots of the learning across the week are captured through ‘selfies’ and comprehension questions (big questions) are designed with a focus on specific reading strategies.

Children deepen their understanding of the texts they read through the systematic use of a series of strategies and language stems. The strategies include predicting, questioning, inferring, clarifying, summarising, making connections and evaluating. The sessions also build a culture of reading for pleasure and purpose. The whole class reading approach enables children to become successful readers through the explicit teaching of key strategies and supports teacher’s formative assessment of reading. It also ensures engagement though an interactive approach and provides a structured methodology to teach key learning behaviours which allow children to be fully independent learners.

Principles of Whole Class Reading:

• To create quality experiences for our children

• To promote reading enjoyment

• To increase reading mileage

• To build firm foundations

• To develop thinking and understanding

• To ensure oracy is at the heart of reading lessons