Reading

'We learn, we love, we look after our world. We strive to be the best that we can be, following in the footsteps of Jesus'

 Reading Intent 

Reading Intent from the moment pupils attend St George’s Catholic Primary School, we encourage and inspire a life-long love of reading. Children will be immersed in the schools reading offer in a number of ways. Children will practise the important skills of reading either individually, in small groups, in pairs or as a whole class. From Reception the reading books are aligned with the phase of the phonics teaching of the Sounds Write programme. There is an emphasis upon early reading enjoyment, enabling our youngest pupils to explore literature, whilst decoding through synthetic phonic teaching. This approach builds throughout their Primary schooling with us.

Each child will have an individual reading book, either linked to the phonics teaching of sounds write or following this in Key Stage 2 a book banded text assessed at the pupils level. Each child will also bring a text home to enjoy with their families from the school library.

Each class has a daily whole class reading lesson, where the children carry out a range of activities, further deepening their love for reading. At St George’s we follow the ‘Hooked on Books’ lessons. In these lessons the pupils will experience 3 types of lessons, a book talk lesson, a demonstration comprehension lesson and an independent comprehension lesson. These lessons allow for group and class discussion about the text, with close monitoring of reading progress of the children. The children are taught explicit skills to allow them to become successful readers, whilst developing a love of reading. Pupils are taught strategies including inference, questioning, clarifying, summarising and prediction, whist activating prior knowledge. The pupils are exposed to a rich and varied range of texts, as part of the reading culture in school, helping them to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually.

As well as in individual pupil texts and the daily whole class reading lesson, the children also have a daily reading for pleasure slot, where the class teacher will read a wide range of texts to the children from their class text. This further exposes the children to a further breadth and depth of texts.

Reading and quality texts are at the heart of all the children’s learning and many further texts can be found throughout their learning in other subjects areas and is indeed the very basis of all learning, such as at the core of the daily writing sessions

Reading pathway Cycle A