Reading

Reading at St Thomas'

‘Reading lessons need to create readers, not just someone who can read.’

At St Thomas we value reading as a key skill where we aim for children to become life long, passionate readers. It is the foundation of our curriculum which can feed the pupil’s imaginations and become open to a vast abyss of wonder for curious minds. It is a fundamental pathway towards achievement for all. Through reading, our children have the chance to develop emotionally, socially, intellectually, culturally and spiritually. We aim to provide a high-quality reading curriculum which is rich in language, creativity, fluency and enthusiasm. Whilst on their learning journey with us, we want children to form good reading habits and create mental models that allow them to engage and evaluate high-quality texts. Reading at St Thomas will expose children to a wide range of texts and genres. This starts by providing children with a language-rich library in both KS1 and KS2. It extends to having vocabulary rich learning environments and staff who continue to inspire an appreciation of our extensive literature. By the time children leave St Thomas children will aim to achieve three components which will allow them to become fluent readers: Accuracy, Automaticity and Prosody.

Reading Long term overview

We follow a Mastery approach to English through the programme Pathways to Read. Units of work are delivered using high quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities

for reading. Skills are built up through repetition within the units, and children apply these skills in the reading activities provided.

Our reading programme is followed by Y2-Y6, the programme is delivered through whole class shared reading lessons. Year 1 begin these sessions begin during Spring 1 providing an introduction to fluency and other reading skills required after decoding. For pupils still needing support with phonics from years 2-6, we provide an individual reading programme that has phonically decodable texts at the heart of it. In our whole class reading, there is a clear teaching focus with the opportunity to master key reading skills in each session. There are follow on reading tasks to enable pupils to evidence the skills they have mastered independently.

Many opportunities for widening children’s vocabulary are given through the Pathways to Read approach and this builds on the extensive work we do in school to provide our children with a rich and varied vocabulary.

You will find the end of year expectations for reading for each of our year groups in the attached documents. For further detail on the skills that your children are learning on a termly basis, please contact your class teacher.

Reading policy