Reading
Reading within the curriculum
“We know that young children who enjoy reading independently will have had the door opened to new discoveries and wide interests, to knowledge, creativity, and confidence. Reading is the critical route to other subjects as well as a provider of wider opportunities for giving more and getting more from life and work”.
Read on, Get on report 2014
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Our intention for reading
At Hope Wood, we value reading as a key life skill. A key focus as a school is ensuring highly effective teaching of the curriculum leads to our young people acquiring the skills they require to become fluent readers.
This includes our young people reading for meaning, purpose and regularly enjoy reading for pleasure. We seek to provide inspirational learning for our young people through well-planned, focused and differentiated lessons.
Our intention is to provide inclusive access to learning no matter what the challenges are that our young people face and that they are able to flourish. Hope Wood operates a stage not age approach.
This allows the young people to access the curriculum at their ability level rather than their age level.
At Hope Wood, we use a wide range of resources that allow our young people to demonstrate their learning and understanding.
It is our intention to ensure that reading is interconnected across the curriculum so that the young people can make purposeful links across their learning. Colleagues’ match to young peoples’ interests and ability, and texts are chosen to motivate, engage, and challenge whilst promoting reading outcomes.
How we implement our reading curriculum
From their starting points, the young people develop skills across aspects of reading. This includes learning to apply their skills to everyday situations, and as a result they achieve success. We base our reading curriculum on a stage, not age approach. Therefore, depending on the young person’s stage, phonics may be supported beyond primary age.
Phonics and reading are a key focus throughout school. Appropriate timetabled time is given with clear objectives and expectations.
Class colleagues hear the young people read individually to develop decoding skills, fluency, comprehension, inference and volcabulary when reading aloud using decodable texts that match Floppy’s Phonics SSP.
Once the young people have completed their phonics programme, they take the Salford Reading and Comprehension test. This generates a reading age and comprehension age to access appropriate texts to their stage.
At Hope Wood we value reading for pleasure highly and work hard as a school to grow our Reading for Pleasure pedagogy. Books are chosen carefully as we want our young people to experience a wide range of books, including books that reflect the young people at Hope Wood and our local community as well as books that open windows into other worlds and cultures.
Phonics
As a school we have chosen to adopt Floppy’s Phonics SSP. Approximately 25% of the school population are at pre-phonics level and 34% accessing phonics.
Phonics and reading are a key focus throughout school. Appropriate timetabled time is given with clear objectives and expectations.
Class colleagues hear the young people read individually to develop decoding skills, fluency, comprehension and inference when reading aloud using decodable texts that match Floppy’s Phonics SSP.
The impact of reading
We know becoming a fluent reader has lifelong benefits, allowing young people to reach their full potential, becoming meaningful members of the wider community. We want our young people to develop reading as a life skill to support with other curriculum areas, employability and day to day living.
How pre reading and reading looks within each pathway
Intent | Implement | Impact | |
Pathway 1 | To have experience of language and stories. |
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Young people react to a range of spoken, written and multimodal texts from familiar contexts. They respond to images of familiar people, objects or events. They fleetingly maintain eye contact with a person or object. They enjoy reading material as it is being read/experienced, shown or told. They can track objects, people or images for a short period of time. |
Pathway 2 | To embed and establish pre-reading skills ready to progress to emergent readers. |
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They identify the main character or event in a familiar text using visual images from the text. They participate in interactive stories and repeat or activate a short phrase or refrain during the sharing of a familiar text. When ‘reading’ young people move through a print text from front to back. They can comment or point to illustrations in reading material to predict the topic of the material. They use a key word to respond to questions about what is happening in a text. They can make a graphophonic identification of their own name. They can match letters and numbers, and identify some letters and numbers named by another. |
Pathway 3 | To embed and establish emergent reader skills; developing comprehension, inference and deduction, reading with increasing fluency and accuracy. |
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They identify the main character and event in an imaginative text. They use visual images to identity the key topic or theme within an informative text. They understand familiar text by using images and communicate a short statement about the text. They can follow a simple pictorial timetable. They select their own reading material by looking at the picture on the cover. They model reading by tracking text page by page, from left to right and top to bottom, and follow or point to a line of text as it is being read. They use illustrations to retell a story and answer simple questions about a story. They recognise the connection between print and the spoken word, identifying spaces, letters and/or words in text, and reading familiar words and signs using partial cues and illustrations. They identify some letters of the English alphabet and their associated sound. They retell a picture story they have selected using key words to describe each picture. They respond to questions and sequence key words to describe or predict what is happening in a picture, film or book. |
Pathway 4 | To have fluent, confident and critical readers. |
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Young people will be fluent, confident and critical readers in readiness for qualifications at an appropriate level. |