Reading

Our vision: ‘Embracing diversity, building a brighter future together’.

‘Learning at Boothferry inspires us to discover, explore and use our knowledge, skills and understanding to develop ourselves as citizens of tomorrow’.

Curriculum Intent

At Boothferry reading is at the heart of our curriculum. Our reading lessons are intended to offer a broad diet of rich texts ensuring children are exposed to all text types several times through each academic year. The lessons have an intention of providing high quality texts and coherent, progressive questions building on all of the skills needed to ensure children are fluent, comprehensive readers. The use of VIPERS questioning is embedded effectively throughout school to ensure a varied, broad and balanced reading curriculum. Each half term all children are exposed to fiction, non-fiction and poetry which is delivered in both shared and guided reading sessions ensuring our children get the tailored curriculum they need. As a school we endeavour to build on children’s vocabulary through a love of reading including vocabulary lessons, drama and spoken language activities. To promote and develop cultural capital we regularly update and choose a diverse range of books for our library ensuring children are exposed to a rich diet of texts.

Our reading curriculum is designed to align with the national curriculum, however, goes above and beyond expectations ensuring texts are selected from our tailored Boothferry reading spine that will inspire and motivate young readers to foster a lifelong love for reading. The curriculum is coherently planned and sequenced allowing pupils to further deepen their knowledge, skills and understanding in all aspects of reading. To support the needs of the children in our school community with low levels of language and many children with English as an additional language, the explicit teaching of language and vocabulary is paramount to our children’s attainment. We understand that Pupils’ acquisition and command of vocabulary are key to their learning and progress across the whole curriculum.

Parents and carers are fundamental in their child’s development and as a school, we encourage through home reading support ensuring parents are well informed about school expectations, rewards and competitions.

Our reading curriculum at Boothferry Primary School enables all pupils to fulfil our school vision embracing diversity, building a better future together.

Curriculum Implementation:

Our reading curriculum is implemented with our curriculum intent at the heart of everything we do at Boothferry Primary School. The use of a book coverage document, curriculum maps and the use of high-quality texts from our reading spine linking to our IPC topics ensure content is relevant and offers a rich diet to all pupils.

Our reading curriculum has a strong emphasis on a progression of skills. These skills are built on year on year and have regular opportunities to be repeatedly practised through the use of VIPERS questioning. The use of these VIPERS questioning is embedded effectively throughout school to ensure children are exposed to the full range of comprehension questions required to be successful readers.

At Boothferry Primary School we offer many opportunities for our community to read with monthly book swaps, word count competitions, home reading rewards, engaged reading time competitions, librarians and celebrating events such as World Book Day and World Read Aloud Day. The use of outside agencies such as poets and authors are invited to visit our children to support our reading curriculum and give children exciting, memorable opportunities.

At Boothferry we value the effectiveness of both shared and guided reading practices, therefore, children are taught shared reading for 3 weeks and guided reading for 3 weeks each half term. This allows teachers to support all children effectively also ensuring SEN, EAL and PPG children are given the correct support and tools to develop their reading as well as stretching our more able readers with greater depth questioning tasks. As a school, we believe success builds on success therefore we work hard to provide children with the crucial devices needed to become fluent readers. These include the use of:

• Repetitive reading to build on fluency and expression
• VIPERS reading questions guaranteeing all reading skills are practiced regularly
• A shared and Guided Reading model which allows all pupils to read, comprehend and deepen their understanding of fiction, nonfiction and poetry
• Termly and half termly assessments using Read, Write Inc, Accelerated Reader and Test Base to provide teachers with detailed, accurate assessments to use for future planning and intervention
• Merit software is used after assessments to inform teachers of gaps in children’s knowledge to support them in the planning process for their next units of reading
• All classes from KS1 to KS2 use our Boothferry reading assessment document which supports a teacher’s decision on their end of year grade, as well as being used as a curriculum coverage document to priorities all objectives
• 1:1 reading with all pupils regularly
• Home reading is pushed from EYFS to Year 6 and parents are supported where necessary
• Use of the school library for children to take home books which are of interest to them
• A broad range of texts including classic literature are covered
• Library displays and reading corridor displays are updated regularly to show visitors and the community of Boothferry how much we value reading success, celebrations and work some of these including; a VIPERS display, word millionaire display, poetry display and books from other cultures focus.
• Links with Goole library to offer children the experience of visiting and completing workshops tailored to their IPC topic as well as encouraging children to take out their own library card to visit with their family

Pupils have the opportunity to listen frequently to stories, poems, nonfiction and other writing, including whole books and not just extracts, so that they build on what was taught previously. In this way, they also meet books and authors that they might not choose themselves. Pupils also have opportunities to exercise choice in selecting books and are taught how to do so using our Read, Write Inc. and Accelerated Reader reading schemes. Teachers have a clear expectation of the end point in which they endeavour their pupils to achieve each term. EYFS and KS1 children are assessed on Read, Write Inc. phonics to ensure they’re grouped effectively to support their individual needs. These children are then exposed to reading books both at school and home to support the sounds they’re learning and reinforce RWI lessons. Each half term KS2 children are assessed using the Star Reader assessment. This gives the teachers and children precise data on their reading age and a child’s NRSS (Normed Referenced Score) which indicates if a child is on track to reach the age expected standard. The Star Reader also gives us a child’s ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) so we can ensure they’re on the correct colour book band on our reading scheme to appropriately challenge themselves.

Curriculum impact:

The reading curriculum has been designed to help teachers teach children effectively with enjoyment. However, it is not enough to assume that children are learning; we need some way of measuring their success. Teachers use formative on-going assessment tools to track reading attainment and give them an indication of every pupils next steps. These include our Star Reader assessments, RWI assessments, use of Merit to track gaps and inform successes in reading knowledge, Test Base SATs style assessments and recording children read. All of these formative assessments are used to give summative data (recorded using O-Track) and these are discussed throughout termly pupil progress meetings with teachers and senior leaders. Reading coordinator reports are written termly, showing attainment trends and identifying specific groups and individuals who need tailored intervention.

As well as a consistent assessment procedure we conduct half termly monitoring and evaluation in reading including learning walks in shared and guided reading. These are effective ways of ensuring whole school implementation, whilst also providing opportunities for staff to share successes and points of improvement. The use of book scrutiny’s, pupil voice and listening to children read are also tools used to inform SLT and the reading lead how we can strive to continuously improve the standards of reading in our school.