Reading  

Intent 

At Wilshere-Dacre Junior Academy, we are committed not only to ensuring that children are equipped with the skills to read fluently and comprehend texts, but also to ensuring that children develop a love of reading that will give them the foundation they need to become lifelong readers. We recognise the interrelated nature of literary skills, and therefore make sure that high quality fiction is central to our literacy provision as we understand the positive impact that reading has not only attainment in Reading lessons, but attainment across the curriculum and the social and emotional development of children more generally. 

Aims 

Wilshere-Dacre Junior Academy aims to ensure a consistent approach to teaching Reading rooted in the principles of effective dialogic teaching and a mastery approach to learning, with a focus on developing children’s metacognition. 

Our aims, in keeping with the aims of the National Curriculum, can be summarised as follows: 

• For all children to read easily, fluently and with good understanding 

• For all children to develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information 

• For all children to acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language 

• For all children to appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage 

• For all children to use discussion in order to learn, elaborating and explaining clearly their understanding and ideas 

Implementation 

Reading fluency and comprehension skills are embedded through discrete whole class Reading lessons and through frequent opportunities to utilise the reading skills children have learned in these lessons across the curriculum, thus further consolidating them. 

In whole class Reading lessons the primary method of explicit Reading provision in our school, dialogic teaching is central to our approach. High quality and ambitious texts are shared as a class, and the skills needed to comprehend these texts are developed first through discussion as a class and verbal modelling of these skills by the teacher, and are then embedded through written activities. In order to complement learning during Reading lessons, opportunities to use these skills in other lessons are actively sought.  

Autumn 1 in every year group is spent explicitly teaching the comprehension-related learning objectives in the National Curriculum. Each skill will be taught starting with a visual hook to develop children’s metacognition, then will be applied to shorter and longer extracts of age-related texts. Once all the objectives have been taught, they will then be applied to the texts outlined in the long-term plan. Although each lesson will have a National Curriculum objective focus, children will have opportunity to apply other objectives in order to consolidate them. All reading lessons start with a vocabulary starter. Ten Tier 2 words will be selected from the class text or the Reach2 Tier 2-word lists, taught on the Monday and consolidated in both Reading and Writing lessons for the rest of the week. Approximately 10 minutes of every Reading lesson will be spent sharing a text, embedding fluency techniques, approximately 5 minutes of every Reading lesson will be a discussion linked to the National Curriculum objective focus of that lesson. Teachers encourage use discussion techniques such as ABC (Agree, Build on and Challenge) in lessons. Children then have opportunity to apply their learning independently. 

Impact 

Each stage of a child’s journey of learning to read, from Key Stage 1 through to the end of Key Stage 2, progressively builds on the skills they have previously learned, with the foundations of reading fluency laid in Key Stage 1 enabling children to access texts and develop their ability to make inferences from texts in Lower Key Stage 2 and then comment on and evaluate the impact of language in Upper Key Stage 2. Termly summative assessments allow teachers to measure the progress pupils are making and expose any barriers to continuing this learning journey that can be supported through both first quality teaching and interventions. 

I love all the different books we get to read in our Reading lessons. - Year 3 student.

When I read, it's like I'm going on an adventure to another world. - Year 6 student.