Reading

At Badby School, reading is at the heart of our curriculum. Our aim is to inspire children and create an ethos of reading for enjoyment as a way of creating lifelong readers. It is our intention that children become confident and fluent readers with good understanding by the time they leave primary school. As good learning goes hand in hand with reading, we want to ensure children are enthusiastic and passionate about reading and aim to develop their phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

We ensure a consistent approach to our reading curriculum which starts in EYFS and KS1 with the teaching and learning of early reading and phonics using the synthetic phonics programme Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. This daily lesson continues through KS1 and into KS2 where necessary. Children are provided with fully decodable books that match and support their phonics development and are encouraged to read both at school and at home with an adult.

Children from Reception to Year 6 take part in guided reading sessions. In Reception and Year 1, this takes place three times a week, following the Little Wandle sessions. In Year 2, this moves into a daily session and is followed all the way up to Year 6. Guided reading begins with a shared lesson, where the teacher models how to apply skills for a particular objective. We use Reading VIPERS to aid our teaching of the reading skills (Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Sequence/Summarise) throughout the week. These skills are then applied in a reading comprehension activity on a Friday. They are also applied to the wider curriculum through reading comprehensions carried out at the start and end of new geography, history and science topics. This allows children to be exposed to new vocabulary and knowledge around the topic, whilst also practising and refining the skills taught in reading sessions.

All children are encouraged to read every night at home and record it in their Reading Records. Every classroom has a beautiful reading corner, equipped with high quality fiction, non-fiction, poetry and topic-themed books for children to choose from. They can also choose from the library, where reading for pleasure is encouraged through displays. Children are encouraged to read books from the Reading Spines we have for each year group, incorporating rich and diverse books across a range of genres.

Teachers read to their class every day and members of staff carry out a reading assembly every week, where they read to the whole school. We have a daily reading session every day - DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) - when the whole school reads for 15 minutes, including members of staff. We also ensure a love of reading through celebrating World Book Days and visits (including virtual visits) from local authors.

Through our approach to reading, children will not only be able to read with confidence, accuracy, fluency and understanding, they will also have developed a love of reading and an ability to take part in discussions around a range of genres. They will have learnt to read and now be developing their knowledge and understanding by reading to learn.