Reading at Rockbeare include fostering a love for literature, developing strong comprehension skills, and nurturing confident, fluent readers.

'The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.'

Dr. Seuss:

Our focus extends beyond decoding words; we aim to cultivate a lifelong passion for books and empower students to explore diverse genres. By creating a rich reading environment, we encourage critical thinking, creativity, and empathy through the magic of storytelling.

Intent

Here at Rockbeare C of E Primary, we believe that all children have the right to be fluent and confident readers as this helps to unlock the doors to future success, for enjoyment and for academic and professional attainment. All members of staff have high aspirations of children and this is demonstrated through the school’s ethos of consistently striving for excellent teaching and outcomes for children in reading. We believe in both the importance of developing children’s discrete word- reading skills and comprehension, and the need to engender a love of books and reading that will last a lifetime. 

It is our intent to provide pupils with a high-quality education in English that will teach all pupils to speak, read and write fluently. It is our intention when teaching the English curriculum that our pupils acquire the necessary knowledge, skills and understanding to become lifelong learners and linguists. Our aim is to ensure that every child becomes a reader, a writer and confident speaker by the time they leave Rockbeare C of E Primary School.

At Rockbeare, we value reading as a key life skill, and are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers. We strive to ensure that all our pupils receive a well-rounded learning experience when reading which will equip them with the fundamental tools to achieve to their ability and beyond. It is our intention to immerse pupils in the wonders of quality texts to instil a love for reading, a passion for discovery and a confidence to explore their imagination. We encourage all pupils to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction to develop their knowledge of themselves and the world in which they live, to establish an appreciation and love of reading and to gain knowledge across the curriculum. It is our intention to ensure that, by the end of their primary education, all pupils are able to read fluently, and with confidence as reading really is the key for academic success.

Implementation

Our reading curriculum is shaped by our school vision which aims to enable all children, regardless of background, ability, additional needs, to flourish to become the very best version of themselves they can possibly be.

At Rockbeare, our reading curriculum links closely with our writing curriculum; we use a text-based approach that enables us to create opportunities for reading, discussion and writing within English and reading lessons. In early KS1, there is a greater emphasis on phonics; this is then applied throughout the rest of the school to consolidate what has been learnt. We encourage reading for pleasure through children having a choice of challenging and enriching texts as well as building in time for children to read independently and as part of a whole class. All children have daily opportunities to read a variety of material in school, including regularly with an adult.

Phonics

At Rockbeare, we teach phonics through Sounds Write. This is a phonics based reading programme approved by the DfE, which provides a structured and systematic approach to teaching reading, spelling and writing to children. Please see our  Phonics Policy for further information.

Reading Experiences at Rockbeare

Each week, we spend time enjoying reading for pleasure in our classrooms during a dedicated reading for pleasure time. When we read for pleasure, pupils are able to choose the books they wish to read and enjoy, can choose to share a book with a peer, read the ‘BBC Newsround’ to read about the world around them, choose to read topic books related to our wider curriculum or listen to an adult in the classroom reading aloud to the children.

Children are read to each day by their class teacher. This could be a book that the teacher recommends to the class or a recommendation from a child.

Reading lessons takes place once a week with a teacher. These lessons focus on teaching the reading skills focusing on vocabulary, inference, prediction, evaluation, retrieve and summarising/sequencing.

If children are working below their chronological reading age, targeted intervention and support is put in place. Children in all classes still have access to story time and have a class book for a sustained period: this ensures that reading is correctly modelled to children as well as giving them the opportunity to enjoy being read to!

We believe the importance of daily personalised reading practice cannot be overstated and children also have opportunities to read aloud to an adult and share books with their peers.

Reading for Pleasure

Teachers instil in children a love of literature by modelling reading and sharing own reading activities. Adults read to children, listen to them read and give them access to a range of high quality fiction, non-fiction texts and poems.

We spend time developing children’s oracy skills using a variety of approaches. Our classrooms and shared spaces contain inviting reading areas, both indoor and outdoor, to promote pupils love of and knowledge of books. Reading is promoted through display and reading books around school to enable pupils to have as many opportunities to be immersed in reading. We give all children the opportunity to enter the magical worlds that books open up to them.

Reading is not only celebrated in classrooms here at Rockbeare. Around the school, you will find displays which celebrate reading, inspiring reading corners and spaces, children’s favourite book, authors, genres and recommended a classroom reading display.

In addition, throughout the school year the importance of reading is enhanced through World Book Day, author and poet visits, shared reading experiences across classrooms and Book Fairs. 

Reading Levelled Books

Once children have completed the Sounds Write programme, they will move on to book levelled books.  Children are assessed against the National Curriculum for their appropriate year group and the Oxford Reading Tree criteria. From these assessments, children are given an appropriate level and a target for the half term. These targets will be taught through guided reading lessons and one-to-one interventions. The children have a wide range of books to choose from which provide a rich and varied choice of writing styles, genres and artwork styles at every level. Since the children are reading books at their reading and interest levels, they are able to learn and grow at their own pace, developing their comprehension skills from Year 2 upwards.

Impact

Through the teaching of systematic phonics, our aim is for children to become confident readers by the end of Key Stage One. This way, children can focus on developing their fluency and comprehension as they move through the school. Attainment in reading is measured using the statutory assessments at the end of Key Stage One and Two. These results are measured against the reading attainment of children nationally. Attainment in phonics is measured by the Phonics Screening Test at the end of Year 1.

However, we firmly believe that reading is the key to all learning and so the impact of our reading curriculum goes beyond the results of the statutory assessments. At Rockbeare, ‘pupil voice’ shows that pupils enjoy reading and are confident when talking about the skills they need to be a good reader.

Through our focus on ‘Reading for Pleasure’, our children enjoy reading a range of texts and genres by many different authors. This enhances a deep love of literature across a range of genres, cultures and styles. Pupils are asked for their opinions on reading within school as part of the HoTL and reading leaders routines.

Regardless of background, ability or additional needs, by the time children leave Rockbeare, they will: - be enthusiastic and motivated readers who are confident and will enjoy reading a wide variety of genres and text types - have the skills to decode words in order to be able to read fluently with a secure understanding of what they have read - be inspired by literature and will read for pleasure.