Reading

Intent

At Corpus Christi Catholic Primary school we endeavour to provide our students with the skills to read widely, fluently and with understanding. We aim to provide our children with the opportunity to explore a range of texts including fiction, non-fiction, poetry and musical lyrics. This is further enhanced through both the English curriculum and the wider curriculum. At Corpus Christi, we regularly review our text coverage to ensure that the children are exposed to ethically, diverse texts which cover relevant subject matter such as global warming, social action and equality. We aim for our reading curriculum and environment to both empower and inspire our children to read widely gaining knowledge and insight into the wider world they live in as well as build a life-long enjoyment for reading where they can escape into imaginary worlds. Furthermore, we strive to create opportunities where the children can become confident in reading for meaning and with purpose, including developing children’s expression, intonation and understanding.

Implementation

Within our Early Years provision, the children begin their reading journey through learning phonics following the Read Write Inc scheme. Throughout the English provision and beyond, the children are exposed to a wide range of picture books which are used to develop their oral communication, knowledge of story patterns, rhyme, understanding (comprehension) and love for reading.

Within Key Stage One, the children continue to follow the Read Write Inc scheme as a main approach to learning phonemes, fluency and comprehension. When the children are proficient in reading within the Read Write Inc scheme, the children begin our ‘Reading Beyond Read Write Inc’ lessons. These continue to build upon the skills the children have learnt within their phonics lessons and starts to encourage them to become more independent readers. Within the lessons the children:

Learn and review additional sounds daily.
Paired read a key text and listen to an adult read the same text as a model.
Re-read the text for fluently.
Complete a prosody activity such as practising pausing at punctuation, using expression for punctuation, intonation and expression for character’s voices and pace and rhythm for poetry.
Focus on VIPERS skills as a whole class.
Complete an independent comprehension activity building on from the class discussion and self-mark their work.

Within Key Stage One and Two, the children access a weekly Shared Reading lesson. Within these lessons, the children are exposed to a range of text including both classic and modern books and extracts. The children have the opportunity to read widely including fiction, non-fiction, poetry and musical lyrics. Within each Shared Reading lesson the children:

Explore key vocabulary to support their understanding and comprehension
Read the text to build on their fluency including individual reading, paired reading, modelled reading and choral/ echo reading.
Develop their scanning and skimming skills
Use VIPERS as an aid to support discrete comprehension skills (predicting, inferring, explaining, retrieving, sequencing and summarising).

Moreover, to foster a love of reading the children access the library once a week where they can choose a book to take home. Each class also has a dedicated reading area where key texts are kept to support the children’s learning or support fostering a love of reading.

For children who need extra support, targeted intervention is used throughout school which includes one to one phonics, small group phonics, fluency/ prosody intervention, Fresh Start, provision teach and one to one reading of a child’s home reading book (frequent reading).

Impact

Our children will:

Be engaged within lessons and develop a passion for reading.
Develop their knowledge of vocabulary and be able to use this to access a wide range of texts.
Have a good understanding of different genres and authors.
Be fluent readers.
Read for purpose being able to discuss different texts, their meaning and beyond (predicting and inferring).

KS2-Parent Reading Workshop