Reading is incredibly important and is central to accessing all areas of the curriculum. We believe that reading is integral to a child’s understanding and appreciation of the world around them; that it offers a platform that allows our children to see beyond what they know and experience in their lives, share in cultural experiences and develop the vocabulary they need to effectively express themselves.
We recognise that a love of reading should last well beyond their time with us and that is why we are taking steps to develop our culture of ‘reading for enjoyment’. We have created a carefully chosen ‘reading spine’ of key texts to have as our class reader texts (see Reading Spine document). To ensure that children have the opportunity to experience these , time to read class reading books is timetabled in three times a week. Each class also has a timetabled slot to visit the library each week to ensure that children have access to our wide range of texts they can read for enjoyment.
We ensure our children become fluent readers by offering a multi-faceted approach to reading. We use our whole class reading approach, ‘Reading Masters’, to teach key comprehension strategies as well as providing a synthetic phonics intervention (Read, write Inc in Years 3 and 4 and Read, Write Inc Fresh Start in Years 5 and 6) for those who require it. We also make sure that there are lots of opportunities for children to read across the curriculum, to read independently and hear high quality texts read aloud.
We recognise that reading at home plays a crucial role in developing our children as readers and therefore ask that children read three or four times a week at home as part of their compulsory homework. It is important that children are motivated to read at home regularly; when their reading opportunities increase, so does their fluency and stamina which in turn increases their enjoyment of reading. We celebrate children reading at home through recognising them in collective worship and awarding house points for their efforts. We understand the significance of parents and carers in supporting their children to develop both word reading and comprehension skills, so we endeavour to build a home-school partnership which enables parents and carers to have the confidence to support their children with reading at home. Please see the ‘How to Help Your Child with Reading’ document for further guidance with this.
We use an approach called ‘Reading Masters’ to teach reading. This involves reading and studying the same text for four sessions each week. Each session focuses on learning and practicing a different comprehension skill. We make sure we link these to our topic or our English work which further supports children’s immersion, understanding and enjoyment in a topic of learning as well as providing an opportunity to learn new vocabulary. Please see below for further information.
At Dereham Church of England Junior Academy, we also run phonics intervention groups in Years 3 and 4 to support all our children to become fluent readers. We run a Read Write Inc Fresh Start phonic intervention for children in Years 5 and 6 which has content tailored to suit the needs and interests of older children. Your child’s class teacher will let you know if your child is part of this.
At Dereham Junior Academy, we are committed to helping our children to develop a love of reading and providing children with the tools and opportunities to read across our curriculum.
