Reading | Broughton Primary School

Broughton Primary School: Teaching and Learning Policy

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Reading Curriculum Area

At Broughton Primary School, we believe that reading is an essential skill for life. We are passionate about teaching children to read & fostering a lifelong love of reading.

Mrs H Taylor- English Lead

At Broughton Primary School we are passionate about teaching children to read and we aim to foster a lifelong love of reading in every child. We provide children with the skills and tools they need to become confident readers with a secure understanding. Reading is at the very core of educational success and is an essential key skill for our pupils.

‘Children do not just ‘become’ readers…fluency and enjoyment are the result of careful teaching & frequent practice.’ (The Reading Framework – teaching the foundations of literacy, DfE, Jan 2022)

Throughout our school we promote reading for pleasure and have fostered an environment which encourages and celebrates children reading for their own enjoyment. We have reading areas in every class and each term every year group studies an author and explores their collection of books. We have developed a carefully selected list of essential reads for each year group to give breadth, diversity and depth to our pupils reading. Each child in our school has a library card and we make regular visits to our local libraries. We hold author events, book clubs, book swap events, sponsored reading challenges, visit our local bookshop and celebrate weekly all of our pupils who read regularly at home. We truly hold reading at the very heart of our learning and this is evident in our pupils positive attitudes towards reading.

‘Reading for pleasure is the single most important indicator of a child’s success.’ (OECD 2002)

Intent

We aim to:

Foster a love of reading through our engaging curriculum which has a variety of literature, non-fiction and poetry.
Provide children with essential life-long skills to ensure they can read confidently, fluently and have a secure understanding. We have a consistent approach to reading teaching, closely monitor pupil progress and close any gaps.
Create exciting opportunities for pupils to read for pleasure by introducing them to new authors, providing a range of exciting, changing texts from different genres.
Build a community of engaged readers who turn to reading for meaning and pleasure. Pupils participate in events with established authors, regularly visit libraries/local bookshops, take part in read-a-thons, book fairs and school book swap events.
Ensure that reading is a transferable skill and pupils have opportunities to read across the curriculum and use texts to discover and retrieve information.
To acquire strong understanding and comprehension skills through challenging discussions and being able to analyse the authors choice of writing conventions and how these impact the reader.

Teaching Reading

We teach children the skills of reading through our daily guided reading sessions which take place in both KS1 and KS2. Teachers listen to every child read at least once a week and these guided reading sessions allow us to improve a child’s comprehension skills by:

Teaching the skills of how to retrieve information
Use inference by finding evidence from the story to support ideas
Discuss new vocabulary and talk about why an author has made particular word choices
Talk about events in the plot and sequence key story components

Home Reading & Strive-For-Five

We have a strong reading culture at Broughton School and parents/carers/family help us to achieving this together. All children are given a reading book and journal from Reception upwards. Children are expected to read every evening after school, once reading journals are signed a child will move up the reading chart. Each class has a Strive-for-Five display (see photo) and we celebrate the class with the highest percentage of readers every week in Celebration Assembly. Children also are rewarded with a raffle ticket each week if they have reached the top of the chart & one lucky winner each term wins a book token!

Assessment and Support for Our Pupils

All of our children’s reading progress is monitored throughout the academic year, this helps us provide the correct book level for children to make sure we are giving them adequate challenge in their reading. Monitoring our pupil’s reading also allows us to identify any children who may benefit from extra support. As well as daily phonics and guided reading sessions we also tailor support for pupils who are struggling to give them additional help. Support sessions take many forms and children might work one to one with an adult or in a small group, depending on their needs. Our ‘Waves of Reading Support Model’ shows the support we give to pupils throughout the whole school.

Reading_WavesIntervention

Class Authors

To develop children’s knowledge of different authors each class celebrates the works of a different author each term. Children are taught about the author’s background & have access to a full range of their books. Class teachers read extracts from their books and children have the opportunity to immerse themselves in that particular author’s world. Children discuss their favourite author’s books, explore common themes between author’s books and understand how an author’s background may have influenced their writing.

Reading_ClassAuthors

Reading Areas

Each class in our school has a dedicated reading area which is an inviting place where children can discover new genres and enjoy reading books. Our books are regularly updated with new titles and we have a choice of fiction and non-fiction titles. Children are involved in the process of selecting the titles and they are consulted for their suggestions. We pride ourselves in investing in a wide range of titles for our book areas which celebrate many diverse themes As well as each child having a class reading area we also have a newspaper stand for children to enjoy reading at break times. As a school we subscribe to First News newspaper, Kids National Geographic, comics and children's magazines.

English Reading Den

Library & Bookshop Visits

Each class, from Reception to Year 6, makes regular visits to our local library branch and we have arranged for every child in our school to be issued with their own library card. We encourage children to make full use of these facilities outside of school too so they can access an even wider range of texts. We also take our younger pupils (Reception to Year 2) to attend story time sessions in our local bookshop. The sessions allow children to listen to some exciting new books and familiarise themselves with newly released titles.

Library Visits

Author Events

We hold regular author events within school to inspire and engage our children. We have local authors who are able to come into school and share their stories with pupils. We access the Seven Stories National Literacy Centre author programme to take part in online events which children can listen to the most current & popular children’s authors. Children have had the opportunity to take part in digital events with the current Children's Laureate Joseph Coehlo, Lauren Child, Nick Butterworth, Michael Rosen, Andy Griffiths and Greg James to name just a few…

Reading_DigitalAuthorEvents

Book Swap Events

To allow our pupils free access to books we hold a yearly book swap event – each child is given a voucher to exchange for a free book at the book swap. It is a great way for children to recycle their old books and get some new reading material for free. We have received great support from families for the event and it is a key part of our World Book Day celebrations.

Reading_BookSwap

World Book Day

We enjoy celebrating World Book Day in a meaningful way at Broughton School which is fun and linked to a love of literature! Children take part in our whole school competition to decorate a potato as a famous literary character – the results are always so creative & imaginative. We have a digital book trail which children can follow to listen to extracts of some new books. The ‘Where’s Wally’ letter hunt to unscramble the letters of a famous author is great fun for all pupils. We screen various digital events throughout the day which children can listen to famous authors or watch screen plays. In the afternoon children spend their vouchers in our book swap event (so every child goes home with a pre-loved book to enjoy), spend some pocket money at the Usborne Book stall and exchange their free WBD token for a book of their choice. World Book Day is always a celebration which our pupils look forward to…

Reading_WorldBookDay

Top 20 Recommended Read’s for each class

We have devised our own Broughton Top 20 Reads for every year group. Books which we think children will love and treasure. If was almost impossible to select just 20 books for each class but we have tried to get a good variety of contemporary and classic fiction, non-fiction, diversity and poetry. The full list of each book and author are included in the supporting documents below. We are working on developing a reward system for those children who take on the challenge to read every book on their class list…