English - Reading
At Langdon Academy, the curriculum has been designed with reading at its core and it is woven across all curriculum areas. We share and promote a love of reading for all pupils as we recognise that learning to read raises children’s self-esteem and self-efficacy and develops the wider characteristics of effective learning. This learning cycle involves pupils’ developing and strengthening their metacognitive processes to know more, remember more and ability to do more, which enables pupils to enhance their view of the wider world.
We want our children to know that reading can make a difference throughout their whole lives.
From Early Years through to our transitional work with the secondary phase, the knowledge and skills required to be a proficient reader are continually evaluated and developed to facilitate all our pupils including the most disadvantaged and those with special educational needs and/or disabilities are able to understand and apply these transferable skills and strategies across the curriculum.
Our curriculum is strengthened by the use of research and collaboration with external partners. The curriculum we have constructed is built upon a secure pedagogical content knowledge and reflects the school’s local context to powerfully address social disadvantage. This knowledge transcends throughout our curriculum by experienced teachers who recognise the importance of closing the educational gap through explorations, questioning and interrogation as our pupils’ access a broad and extensive range of texts/genres and online platforms to understand the effect on the reader.
The curriculum addresses gaps and extends pupils’ knowledge and skills, as we ensure all pupils have access to schemes of work which are purposeful, effective and connected. This we believe ensures all our pupils’ have ever improving outcomes to become proficient fluent readers. We recognise that learning to read and developing fluency contributes to an individual’s learning power and supports their resilience, concentration and perseverance of the written word.
The curriculum has been designed to explicitly show the variety and importance of the written word through modelling, scaffolding and explicitly celebrating the written word within a print rich environment.
We strive to encourage and foster a love of reading, where pupils are able to answer with confidence and understanding how reading can and will make a difference to them now, through the transitional phases of their future education and their success as future citizens in the world.
Our Reading Curriculum:
At Langdon Academy, the steps to fostering a love of reading are the cornerstone to delivering our curriculum as we recognise that the ability to be a fluent proficient reader enables pupils to succeed in their educational careers at primary school and beyond. Reading is a skill that requires continual development and the curriculum implemented endeavours to facilitate every individual to develop, grow and become readers.
Underpinning all learning at Langdon is our shared view that an extensive vocabulary and understanding of what is read is the key to success in all areas and pupils are encouraged to think about the effect on the reader. Discussion with adults and peers, find read talk, pair reading, pausing, think aloud, clarify, skim, pausing, questioning and making links to prior experience are all different strategies which all play a part in supporting each child to understand and embrace what they are reading.
From Reception through to Year Six, every pupil has access to a daily succinct reading curriculum which develops reading comprehension skills, supports pupils’ vocabulary knowledge and learning within the wider curriculum.
The Schofield and Sims Reading Comprehension scheme ‘Complete Comprehension’ has been adopted within our school and supports a curriculum which is purposeful, effective and connected. Within a lesson, learning will incorporate a clear sequential teaching sequence that explicitly teaches reading skills and strategies. The use of high quality, language rich texts broaden a pupil’s reading experience through fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts which intend to engage the reader, enhances knowledge and provides a clear focus on reading progression through each academic year.
Supportive Online Platforms:
In addition to the physical resources within our school environment, from year 3 pupils have access to online platforms including Accelerated Reader (AR). Each pupil is able to read different text in accordance with their Z.P.D. These platforms enable pupils to deepen their knowledge of subjects across the curriculum alongside developing reading for pleasure through pupil choice. Each half term information is collected to create projects within bookfinders with AR are researched to provide further purposeful reading opportunities, these texts can be used as part of the teaching learning cycle within school or as additional homework.
We also use an online platform called Bug Club, which allows teachers to allocate books for children based on their current reading level across KS1 and Big Cat Online texts linked to their phonics needs.
Staff foster a love of Reading:
As a reading teaching team, we constantly strive to hone our teaching skills to ensure a high-quality, rich learning environment for all our pupils and recognise the importance of staff as reader role models. Staff are guided by research which states developing a positive attitude to reading facilitates greater reading attainment and writing ability and recognises the reciprocal cycle to an individual’s holistic development.
Throughout our school environment, reading is celebrated, the importance of reading can be evidenced across the curriculum through numerous initiatives:
Well stocked and thought out library areas in each class provide all pupils and staff to read and experience a range of text/media types and genres including newspapers, maps, children’s classics and poetry. Within each school day, pupils are encouraged to choose texts to read for pleasure, this fosters a love of reading through choice and variation. This initiative supports pupils’ reading development through choice, satisfaction and interest; as a staff we understand the active process to promote a positive reading attitude: a greater insight into human nature, other cultures and breadth of vocabulary.
Alongside this, pupils are encouraged to develop their reader voice by predicting or reviewing texts which can be used by other pupils, this can trigger an interest in a reluctant reader, furthermore, buddy reading systems encourage pupils to explain, teach and can provide a confidence boost to support reading for pleasure.
Building an extensive vocabulary
Vocabulary work across the curriculum is supported within both our Reading and Writing approach, pupils develop broader, deeper vocabulary knowledge through planned activities
to facilitate pupils to question/justify the use of language chosen by an author through Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary. Pupils are supported to develop and deepen skills which interrogate the text, these discussions by staff and pupils are important to make links between the effect on the reader and the effect as a writer which incorporate the how, what and why the writer has chosen/created a phrase/paragraph/piece of writing.
After each unit of work, the vocabulary which has been introduced and applied in their reading and writing activities continues to be accessed and applied in further learning across the year.