Reading
At Leek First School, we value reading as a crucial life skill and understand the importance of developing a reading culture throughout the school and community that focuses on both the development of reading fluency, comprehension and reading enjoyment. We want our children to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose.
Our reading curriculum has three key components:
It has been designed to enable every child to become a fluent, confident reader to allow them not only to access the breadth of the curriculum but to help them to explore the world around them.
Each class is also immersed in a rich ‘Reading Journey’ full of high quality texts that have been chosen to develop the children’s language, knowledge of authors and genres as well as a greater understanding of the wider world.
We adopt the ‘Simple View of Reading’ and explicitly teach comprehension skills alongside word recognition and decoding. These two key elements are taught through a well-planned ‘Reading Journey’ that provides the children with a broad range of vocabulary and genres.
Those children who are following the Little Wandle SSP, comprehension is taught through the guided reading sessions. As the children secure their phonics knowledge, greater focus is placed on the explicit teaching of the VIPERS reading skills:
- Vocabulary
- Inference
- Prediction
- Explaining
- Retrieval
- Sequencing / Summarising
These reading skills are taught through Whole Class Reading sessions, Talk for Writing units of work, other subjects across the curriculum as well as during our daily whole class reading.