At St Matthew's Primary School we believe that reading is an essential life skill and we are committed to enabling our children to become lifelong readers.

At the heart of our strategy is our drive to foster a love of reading, enriching children’s learning through carefully designed teaching activities that utilise imaginative stories and thought provoking texts.

Reading is a skill that enables children to develop their learning across the wider curriculum and lays the foundations for success in future lines of study and employment. We recognise the importance of taking a consistent whole school approach to the teaching of reading in order to close any gaps and to target the highest possible number of children attaining the expected standard or higher.

We have high expectations of all children and we encourage children to challenge themselves, persevere and pursue success, so everyone can flourish in their chosen future.

Implementation

At St Matthew's Primary School we use a synthetic phonics programme called Little Wandle. 

More information can be found about this on our phonics curriculum page here. 

At St Matthew's all classes follow a structured 5 day approach to reading activities. All sessions are interactive and teachers facilitate speaking and listening opportunities, with children working hard individually. Passive learning is minimised and engagement promoted through regular use of think-pair-share, responses on mini-whiteboards and collaborative tasks. 

We have 5 sessions of 'Whole Class Reading' which incorporate vocabulary, text immersion,  paired and echo reading and some comprehension activities. More complex questions are modelled and evaluated between wider groups and teachers model how to refine answers to a high standard.

Accelerated Reader sessions are used to further a child's understanding and comprehension. All children in KS2 are assessed using the Star reading assessment and this identifies their reading level and age.  Children choose books within their given level and complete an online quiz at the end of each book.  This gives children the opportunity to read texts with greater independence and apply their skills when responding to the wide range of domain questions.  

At St Matthew's we believe that regular reading at home is an important tool in developing reading skills. Books from Accelerated Reader are used for home-reading to ensure that children experience a wide breadth of reading opportunities across different genres and parents are encouraged to talk about the books with their children. 

Impact

As we believe that reading is key to all learning, the impact of our reading curriculum goes beyond the result of statutory assessments. Children have the opportunity to enter the wide and varied magical worlds that reading opens up to them. As they develop their own interest in books, a deep love of literature across a range of genres cultures and styles is enhanced.

Through the teaching of systematic phonics and reading enquiry, our aim is for children to become fluent and confident readers who can apply their knowledge and experience to a range of texts through the Key Stage 2 curriculum.

As a Year 6 reader, transitioning into secondary school, we aspire that children are fluent, confident and able readers, who can access a range of texts for pleasure and enjoyment, as well as use their reading skills to unlock learning and all areas of the curriculum. We firmly believe that reading is the key to all learning and so the impact of our reading curriculum goes beyond the results of the statutory assessments.

In addition to this:

• Parents and carers will have a good understanding of how they can support reading at home, and contribute regularly to home-school records.
• The % of pupils working at age related expectations and above age related expectations within each year group will be at least in line with national averages and will match the ambitious targets of individual children.
• There will be no significant gaps in the progress of different groups of pupils (e.g. disadvantaged vs non-disadvantaged)