Reading

At Our Lady of the Rosary School, our vision is to transform the lives of our pupils within a Catholic environment by nurturing the wellbeing of each child, promoting the highest academic achievement and instilling a lifelong love of learning. We aim to fulfil our school strap line ‘Faith, Love, Learning’ by igniting a thirst for knowledge and a desire to achieve through an engaging and creative curriculum that promotes the highest academic achievements and prepares our pupils to be successful in their adult life.

Our Vision...

Throughout a child’s time at Our Lady, reading is at the heart of our curriculum where we aim to encourage a love of reading through daily reading, independent reading, reading in the wider curriculum and using core texts to stimulate writing. We believe that every child should be given opportunities to read for pleasure. All children will learn to read with confidence, fluency and understanding, providing them with the skills required to achieve a lifetime of enjoyment through reading.

 As a school, we share and celebrate Reading with pride and express that every child is an Our Lady of the Rosary Reader.

Intent

At Our Lady of the Rosary, we believe that all pupils should be provided with the opportunity to become confident and fluent readers with a good understanding of different genres and texts. Through a selection of carefully of chosen texts, pupils will acquire a wide vocabulary and understanding of grammar, which can be applied throughout the curriculum. We aim for all of our pupils to talk confidently about a broad range of texts (including poetry and non-fiction), using the progressive skills taught during lessons. At Our Lady, we believe it is important to provide opportunities for Reading for Pleasure, which we encourage through our book themed days and events as individual classes, and across the whole school e.g. World Book Day. Book Fairs are held to allow all children the chance to look at new books of all genres and hopefully purchase a new book of their own to take home! Our well-stocked book corners promote authors and a range of reading material to appeal to all pupils.

Implementation

• In the EYFS, children first become aware of print in their environment and match pictures and words.
• Language comprehension is developed by talking and reading to the children.
• Children are introduced to stories allowing them to orally compose a story which is acted out by themselves and their peers.
• The first books given are phonetically decodable.
• Our reading books are organised into coloured Book Bands.
• Children are assessed regularly and move onto the next Book Band when their fluency and understanding show that they are ready. Children move through the Book Bands until they reach the required standard to become a Free-Reader, choosing a book to read from our well-stocked school or class book areas. In lessons, children develop their fluency skills as well as develop their comprehension skills.
• Children also take part in Guided reading sessions where children are heard read by the class teacher in a small group. During these sessions, children also have the opportunity to complete their work on Reading plus, a digital reading programme that develops children’s fluency, comprehension and vocabulary.
• We monitor each child’s progress using a range of assessment strategies e.g. Reading Age tests, on-going 1 to 1 reading observations with a class adult and monitoring of home reading records. In addition, children in Year 1 are tested through phonics screening tests and in KS1 and KS2 year groups, reading comprehension tests are carried out termly.
• Children have access to Reading Plus which is implemented in school 3 times a week. This develops the children’s confidence, fluency and comprehension skills on a variety
• In class, core texts are also used as stimulus for writing with children being exposed to a range of genres, authors and topics throughout their journey. Each class has a set of progressive core texts that are used as part of English lessons.
• Reading comprehension lessons are taught focusing on developing particular skills within each lesson (retrieval, inference, summarising, vocabulary, PEE) and are based off of the class texts taught throughout the year so are specific to each year group.
• Pupils are taught through clear modelling and have the opportunity to develop their fluency and vocabulary during each lesson.

Impact

Here at Our Lady of the Rosary, we are proud of the progress and achievement made by our children. The children will have had opportunities to read a diverse range of texts, understanding that reading can be for pleasure or to enhance knowledge as well as having a good understanding of their reading ability and choosing books appropriate to their level. Children will be enthusiastic about their reading and approach reading tasks with confidence.