St Wilfrid's C of E Primary School

At St Wilfrid’s, we understand the importance of developing a child as a whole reader, ensuring that they leave primary school confident, happy readers who enjoy a wide range of texts. The basic principles of the teaching of reading can be separated into two key concepts: word reading and comprehension and this underpins our teaching of reading from Foundation Stage to Year 6. We aim to expose children to a range of high quality texts, offering them to opportunity to develop a love of reading and rich literature diet. Through our teaching of reading, we aim to ensure that children leave St Wilfrid’s able to read fluently and confidently, in any subject.

The National Curriculum states that, ‘through reading in particular, pupils have a chance to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. Literature, especially, plays a key role in such development. Reading also enables pupils both to acquire knowledge and to build on what they already know.’

Early Reading and phonics – At St Wilfrid’s, we use the Little Wandle systematic synthetic phonics programme to deliver our teaching of early reading and phonics. Please click here to find more information about the teaching of early reading and phonics at our school.

Ready Steady Comprehension – At St Wilfrid’s, we teach whole class reading through the use of ‘Ready Steady Comprehension’ to ensure that our readers have the opportunity to learn through a variety of different texts. Through a consistent and considered teaching sequence, children are exposed to fictions, non-fiction and poetry with many texts linking to our broader curriculum. The teaching sequence below demonstrates how the development of fluency, vocabulary and understanding of text are embedded throughout all of our reading lessons. The strategies needed for children to develop as readers are explicitly modelled, with children then having the opportunity to practise and apply the taught reading strategies.

Reading for Pleasure - Reading for enjoyment in something that we aim to develop in all of children at St. Wilfrid’s Primary School. From EYFS to Y6, all children will be immersed in a range of different texts through our ‘class stories’, which allows children the opportunity to just sit, relax and enjoy being read to. These books are chosen to ensure that all children have access to a wide range of high quality texts of different genres and are also reflective of our school’s commitment to ensuring diversity and representation within our curriculum.

Library - At St. Wilfrid’s, we are also incredibly fortunate to have our wonderful class library, which children visit regularly. Children are given the opportunity to explore our library, read in it and choose books to be taken home. The library is also open after school on Fridays until 3.45pm.

Enrichment – In order to encourage a love of reading, we also endeavour to give children the opportunity to celebrate a love of reading whenever possible! We have authors and poets visit to speak to children about their work and inspire them, in addition to having visits from theatre companies. We celebrate World Book Day every year with themed activities to encourage that love of reading.

Reading at home – In school, we understand the importance of ensuring that children are also read with at home. The expectation at St Wilfrid’s is that children are read with a minimum of three times weekly (ideally daily) and this is recorded via Boomreader (or an alternative paper diary if the child is in EYFS).

Book bands - Book bands are used to indicate the reading level of the books children read in school and at home before they are fluent enough to move on to 'free reading.' The same book band colours are used by many different publishers and this allows us to provide our children with a wide variety of books to read, whilst ensuring that the book they choose is appropriate to their ability. When they move on from the lime band, children are given ‘transition’ books to read before they are assessed on their readiness to become a ‘free reader’. Often transition books will be short chapter books or more detailed non-fiction books. 

The following list shows how children progress through the book bands:

The impact of our reading curriculum is measured in many ways, including:

• Formative assessment – the work collated in children’s reading journals alongside consistent teacher assessment during teaching time
• Pupil Voice – the engagement of our pupils with the reading curriculum, in addition to their enjoyment of reading
• Summative assessment – the use of NFER/past SAT papers to formally assess children’s progress termly. In Y6, children will complete the end of KS2 SATs.