The overarching aim for English in the national curriculum is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written word, and to develop their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment.
The national curriculum for English aims to ensure that all pupils:
– comprehension (both listening and reading).
The national curriculum states that ‘It is essential that, by the end of their primary education, all pupils are able to read fluently, and with confidence, in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education.’
At East Dene, our goal is that all children leave us with a passion for reading and that reading becomes a life-long skill. Reading provides children not only with an essential life skill but gives children an emotional understanding of the world, which is necessary to navigate life successfully. We also want all of our children to go on to academic success in secondary school and being a strong reader provides children with the foundations to be able to do this.
We want all of our children to have a rich diet of reading and we aim to ensure that every child has access to a wide range of texts through careful selection of fiction and non-fiction texts. This rich diet ensures that every child can foster a love of reading and discover texts that they truly love. The texts that we study and share with the children are progressive in terms of Lexile count and in the themes in the texts become more complex throughout school.
Reading for enjoyment is something that is in the heart of East Dene. Every child in school is part of their own reading for enjoyment journey, which will continue after they leave Primary School.
Our main aims in reading:
Children must learn to read before they can read to learn. The teaching of early reading and phonics focuses on developing children’s phonetic skills in order to segment and blend to develop fluent readers through the implementation of the Read Write Inc. programme.
When children have completed the phonics programme, children are taught using whole-class reading using a novel that is appropriate to their year group. During these sessions, a range of strategies are used to build a reader’s fluency such as model, echo, choral, paired and repeated reading. Children will then be taught a reading skill from the progression document, following the DERIC skill. The chosen skill will be broken down and a specific question style will be explored in order for children to fully understand that area of reading. In addition to this, children will explore a well-chosen poem or a non-fiction text to broaden their reading experiences apply the DERIC skills to different types of texts.
Once a week, KS2 children have a library session where there is a chance for children to read their book for enjoyment in a quiet environment, explore alternative books and make recommendations to each other using their class scrapbook.
In Y6, children are trained as ‘reading buddies’ to offer additional reading opportunities to children in Y2 to read to someone other than an adult. The children offer a supportive person to help them decode words and understand their book. This means that those children will progress quicker through the RWI scheme.
Every afternoon, children are read to during shared read times, where carefully chosen books are read by an adult to provide children with a model read and children can fully immerse themselves and enjoy the text. Research shows that children who hear a book read to them have a higher reading level and a more complex vocabulary than those who do not.
Children are encouraged to take 2 reading books home. In KS1, children take a phonic, decodable book home and a dream read book, which is to be shared by an adult. In KS2, those children who have completed the phonics scheme take home a coloured book appropriate to their fluency/understanding level and a reading for enjoyment book, which may be shared by an adult if necessary. Children are encouraged for reading 4 times per week and are rewarded for doing so.
Through teacher assessment, individuals or groups of children will be targeted for reading interventions with themselves or teaching assistants to address any gaps in phonetic knowledge, to improve their fluency or to improve their comprehension and understanding of texts.
At East Dene, we want every child to fulfil their potential by making at least good progress from their own starting point so that they are able to read accurately, confidently, fluently and with understanding across a wide range of texts and are ready for the demands of the secondary curriculum when they leave primary school. Furthermore, all children will have developed a life-long love of reading, have a wide understanding of books from different authors, genres, cultures and styles and, as they move forward, will be able to access reading material across all aspects of life from travel brochures to job adverts or academic texts.
In addition to this, we want to ensure that there are no significant gaps in the progress of different groups of pupils (disadvantaged vs non-disadvantaged).
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3 & 4
Year 5 & 6
In reading, there are 5 key concepts that all work together to create the reading experience: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. As children move through primary school, they develop skills in all 5 of these areas to be successful readers.
| Reading concept | Explanation |
| Phonemic awareness | Phonemic awareness is the ability of the child to recognise that all words have phonemes within them and be able to manipulate the phonemes. They should identify patterns within words when they hear them before they can notice these patterns in print. |
| Phonics | Phonics is the study of the relationship between the sounds we can hear in a word and the letters that spell them. This allows children to decode a word by segmenting the phonemes and blending them to spell a word. |
| Fluency | Fluency is the ability to read with accuracy and speed. When children can read fluently, their confidence in reading grows and they are able to access a wider range of books. |
| Vocabulary | Reading vocabulary is all the words a child needs to recognise and understand when reading in order to comprehend a text. There are 3 types of vocabulary words: Tier 1 (basic, everyday words), Tier 2 (contextual, descriptive words) and Tier 3 (subject-specific words). |
| Comprehension | Comprehension is being able to understand and interpret what a child has read. We do this by asking a range of questions using E (explain), R (retrieve), I (interpret) and C (choice). |
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6
Reading Challenge Rationale
Our Reading Challenges are an opportunity to increase children’s range of books they can Read for Pleasure.