Reading

Reading is the bedrock of our English curriculum. At St Peter’s, the children are encouraged to read for enjoyment and understanding, as well as for information with the aim that all pupils will develop an appreciation and love of reading. Children leave St Peters as confident, competent readers with a tangible love of reading. We encourage children to read widely in fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Reading focuses on two areas; decoding (word reading) and comprehension. Decoding skills are seen with both the segmenting and blending of unfamiliar words and the speedy recognition of familiar words. Effective comprehension is the result of secure linguistic knowledge (in particular vocabulary and grammar) and a knowledge of the wider world. Reading also feeds pupils’ imagination and opens up a treasure-trove of wonder and joy for inquisitive young minds thirsty for inspiration.

From Year 1 to Year 6 all children across the schools participate in four weekly whole class reading sessions where key skills are taught alongside in depth book discussion and drama. These sessions also focus upon:

- Deep understanding of the context of a story- geographically, historically and socially.

- Drawing reasoned conclusions from a text using evidence.

- Prosody

- Comprehension questions- VIPERS.

- Drama/character hot seating.

- Summarising for a peer and making reasoned predictions.

- Rich discussion about a character's motivations, intent.

- Rigorous discussion of vocabulary whilst drawing links between language.

Our Reading Progression of Skills sets out which skills need to be taught in each year group.

Reading at home

The schools main reading scheme is ‘Oxford Reading Tree’ however this is supplemented with other schemes including: Project X and Graphic Novels. All children in EYFS and Yr 1  take home purely phonetically decodable books which reflect their learning in class. Children in Yr 2 and 3 stay on the reading scheme so as to ensure a smooth transition into being a KS2 free reader. The reading scheme across school is constantly evolving and as a result children are provided with books that not only challenge but also interest them and encourage a love of reading.

Why is my child re-reading the same text multiple times over the course of a week? Re-reading is a fundamental part of building an orthographic map – we can’t do this without re-reading the texts and without doing this, we won’t be able to read fluently. The purpose of decodable books is that children should be able to read everything independently and with fluency. We need fluency for comprehension. If children read a book once and return it, they won’t have orthographically mapped the words within. We need to read each word a minimum of 4 times to reliably recognised the sound to spelling correspondence and then read this word a number more time (child dependent) to be able to read it without decoding.

In addition to high quality scheme books, the school has a well-stocked library which is regularly audited and refreshed to reflect a progressive and diverse world view. The children go out, a class at a time, each week to change their library books. We use a computerised system to log the books that the children have selected to take home. 

Home learning

St Peter’s has high expectations of home reading as set out in the expectations of home learning document. Children must be reading at least five times during the week. Daily reading is incentivised using a whole school reward system. Those children who haven’t read the requisite amount,  stay inside and are read a high quality, engaging key text by Mrs Morris.

Reading progression

The Reading VIPERS focus on each of the following skills: