Reading
Intent and Implementation
Town Field Primary School is a reading community. We value reading as a key life skill and are dedicated to enabling all of our children to become lifelong readers. We believe that every child can be a reader and aim for our children to have the opportunity to become enthusiastic, fluent and confident readers regardless of their background, needs or abilities.
Our reading curriculum is ambitious in its aim in enabling our children to become confident readers: the progression of texts and skills developed from Nursery to Year 6 enables our children have a deep understanding of the texts they read and supports them with becoming keen and enthusiastic readers. We value reading as a skill required for our children to access all areas of the curriculum and therefore ensure that there are opportunities for children to practise and appreciate the importance of high levels of fluency and comprehension beyond reading lessons.
At Town Field, we are determined that every pupil will learn to read by the time they leave us. Pupils who fall behind are supported to catch up quickly and receive rapid and targeted intervention if they need support to meet age-related expectations. This will provide them with the necessary tools to become successful, independent readers, who can deploy their reading skills at secondary school and beyond.
Town Field Primary serves a rich and diverse community and we believe that books are a powerful tool to enable our children to look out into, and understand, the world around them. We celebrate this diversity throughout the exploration of a range of high quality and age-appropriate stories, poems, rhymes and non-fiction texts: this will develop their vocabulary, language comprehension and a love of reading. Our staff team are reading role models and their passion for reading and deep knowledge of children’s literature encourages our children to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose. As a reading community, Town Field greatly values the role that parents and carers play in teaching their child to read. We aim to work in collaboration with our families to develop an appreciation for reading that extends beyond the school gates and to celebrate our shared love of reading together.
Sequence
At Town Field Primary, we have a rigorous, sequential approach to the reading curriculum. Each year group has quality time dedicated to discrete reading sessions. This time is segmented across the weekly timetable to allow for shorter more frequent sessions. As a result, reading skills are cumulatively built up over the course of the week to enable a deeper understanding of texts.
Fluency
When children are fully equipped with the skills to decode unknown words, they continue on their journey to becoming independent readers by developing their skills for reading fluency.
Reading fluency is the bridge between word recognition and comprehension. Children have the opportunity to practise reading with fluency on a daily basis: strategies for fluency are explicitly taught during reading lessons where teachers effectively model prosody, rate and accuracy.
Teaching and learning strategies
The Town Field Reading Process has been developed to incorporate all the essential elements that underpin the teaching of reading. The Reading Process places age-appropriate, quality texts at the heart of the reading curriculum with children being exposed to a range of stories, poems, rhymes and non-fiction texts.
In order to develop children’s comprehension skills, Reading VIPERS are used during reading lessons. The VIPERS correspond directly with the reading content domains for each year group: they are used to develop children’s understanding of the texts they read through targeted questioning linked to each domain.
Love of Reading
Town Field Primary is a reading community, with parents, pupils and staff all sharing a love of reading. Classrooms are equipped with a range of high-quality texts for children to enjoy. Daily story time fosters a love for reading through dedicated time to listen to, and engage with, books that our pupils love. Please look at our text trackers below: these show a sample of the texts children are currently studying as part of their reading lessons and the books they are sharing with their class during their Love of Reading sessions.
Our children have many opportunities to engage with reading beyond reading lessons to nurture, develop and stretch their talents and interests beyond the school gates. These include events such as World Book Day, Scholastic Book Fair, as well as links with the Doncaster Children’s Library Service. We are also currently part of the National Literacy Trust’s Doncaster Stories project which includes author visits, competitions and many other events to inspire our children