Intent

At Knowle Park, we recognise that being able to read is a vital life skill and has far-reaching implications for lifelong goals, confidence and wellbeing. We promote a love of reading in all classrooms and want to ignite a passion for reading in all children as soon as they start school.

High quality, consistent phonics teaching and access to phonetically decodable books provides all children with the chance to develop the starting point they need as they begin their journey in education. Across the school, we teach a range of reading skills which will allow children to comprehend a variety of texts.

The range of authors and text types we look at provide children with a balanced reading diet and encourage children to explore different authors and genres. Opportunities to share reading with others are built in to the school day and sharing books and texts provides children with opportunities to learn from each other and learn from mistakes.

Implementation

At Knowle Park, we teach reading daily and each unit is divided into 5 sessions. We expose children to a number of different fiction and non-fiction texts and provide opportunities for the children to discuss what they have read whilst making links, asking questions and making predictions.

We believe that while providing children with a love and appreciation of reading, it is also our responsibility and duty to ensure all children leave us with the fundamental skills to enable them become lifelong readers.

A weekly plan looks like this:

Each daily lesson contains an opportunity for practicing fluency, Oracy, and we recap previously introduced vocabulary. At the beginning of the week, we introduce 5 new ‘tier 2’ words which are taken from an age appropriate text. On Tuesday, we use the same text and begin to unpick it focusing on our first response. This is often done using a visual organiser. On Wednesday, we introduce and explicitly model the skill or skills, that we are focusing on, whilst still providing lots of opportunity for talk. On Thursday, we continue practicing the same skill or skills using the same text and the children are more independent with this. On the final day of the sequence, the children apply their learning for the week independently.

Impact

The children at KPPS will:

• Demonstrate that they have the skills to be able to read an age appropriate text fluently and can apply the taught skills independently.
• They are able to express a love of reading and understand why they read.
• They will perceive themselves as readers and not just children who read through reading regularly for pleasure.
• They will be motivated to read a range of texts and will summarise; ask questions and make predictions about what they are reading.
• They are able to participate enthusiastically in discussions about what they have read and are able to express themselves.
• They will be inspired and influenced by a diverse range of quality texts and can draw upon these when choosing or recommending a book.