Reading at St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School
Learning to read is the most important thing your child will learn at our school. Everything else depends on it, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible.
We want your child to love reading – and to want to read for themselves. This is why we put our efforts into making sure they develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read.
'All pupils must be encouraged to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction to develop their knowledge of themselves and the world in which they live, to establish an appreciation and love of reading, and to gain knowledge across the curriculum. Reading also feeds pupils’ imagination and opens up a treasure-house of wonder and joy for curious young minds.'
National Curriculum 2014
At St Joseph’s aim to enable children to:
Develop a love of reading and positive attitudes towards reading so that it is a pleasurable and meaningful activity
Use reading skills as an integral part of learning in all curriculum areas
Read and respond to a variety of texts whilst gaining increased level of fluency, accuracy, independence and understanding
Develop different strategies for approaching reading and to be able to orchestrate the full range of strategies in decoding words.
How do we teach reading at St Josephs?
At St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School we are committed to reading aloud to our children every day.
Reading aloud enables all children to access quality texts but it also enables the teacher to model expressive and fluent reading to the children.
Pupils have access to a wide range of reading opportunities that include:
Guided reading
Shared reading
Paired reading
Regular independent reading for pleasure
Home reading
Hearing books read aloud – various genres and authors. This should be something that is practised at home also - the benefits are enormous and allows children who struggle to decode text that love for books too. Watch this link to here more about the benefits reading to a child can have.
Selecting own choice of texts, including ICT texts
Reading in other subjects, including ICT texts
Buddy reading (older pupils to the younger pupils)
Teacher reading out loud in class/assembly to the children
Children reading out loud in class/church/assembly
Engaging Class texts in all year groups through quality English lessons
Reading across the curriculum
From the beginning of Reception, we will use Read Write Inc. Phonics which is a highly successful English programme created by Ruth Miskin and published by Oxford University Press.
The Read Write Inc. Phonics programme is carefully matched to the new curriculum, giving every child at St. Joseph’s Catholic Primary the best chance of success. See the phonics section on our website for more information.
At St Joseph’s, we focus on fluency as well as comprehension. The teaching sequence begins with fluency, promoting children’s ability to decode written language at word and sentence level, while learning to search for meaning in the text. The comprehension reading domains are taught through the VIPERS approach.
V Vocabulary
I Inference
P Prediction
E Explain
R Retrieval
S Sequence (KS1)
Summarise (KS2)