Reading
Intent
At Shakespeare we believe high-quality reading experiences are at the heart of every subject and how the school moves children from learning to read to reading to learn! When children are taught the necessary skills and crack the ‘Reading Code’ as soon as possible, they are able to access the full curriculum.
Language Unlocks Learning
As a school, we aim to harness a love of reading that inspires and engages. We aim to develop imaginations therefore opening up a treasure house of wonder, joy and knowledge whilst inspiring curious minds. We know that in a mono-cultural school such as ours, we must ensure that our choice of reading material reflects the multi-cultural and diverse society that exists in Britain today.
Through the use of a wide range of texts, we immerse children in vocabulary-rich learning environments that teach children the skills necessary to actively participate in book talk, enabling them to develop literacy, a love of reading, creative writing and excellent communication skills. We know this is vital for learning and in the future.
Our aims in reading are to ensure our Shakespeare children:
- Become confident and fluent readers who read with accuracy, automaticity and understanding.
- Enjoy and develop positive attitudes towards reading and appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage;
- Develop a range of strategies to support their reading e.g. phonetic, graphic, syntactic and contextual.
- Are able to self- correct and make sense of what they are reading.
- Understand the key reading skills; retrieval, prediction, inference, vocabulary, sequencing and summarising.
- Acquire a wide range of vocabulary and are able to identify, discuss and select the authors choice of vocabulary, can summarise and are able to make detailed comparisons in reading.
- Become competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others, participating in debate and performing.
- Actively take part in discussion and questioning in order to elaborate, clarify and develop their understanding.
- Are exposed to a broad and rich range of fiction and non-fiction texts and can confidently apply the essential reading skills to answer and ask their own questions based on what they have read.
Implementation
At Shakespeare, the teaching of reading focuses upon two dimensions: word reading and language comprehension. Our reading vision reflects comprehensive research, which includes the work of the EEF findings; this includes evidence on the impact of the ‘Reading Comprehension House’. The Reading Comprehension House model supports our vision and illustrates that word reading and language comprehension are underpinned by a number of other building blocks of reading.
Based upon these findings, we have carefully designed a reading curriculum that values and is shaped upon the importance of:
- exposing our children to a wide range of vocabulary
- provide opportunities to listen and understand.
- teach key strategic reading strategies, enabling our pupils to become fluent, confident and accurate readers.
Our children are taught to read using a wide range of reading resources, topic-specific and age-appropriate texts. Furthermore, explicit links are made with our school’s writing approach to ensure reading is meaningful and purposeful resulting in better outcomes in both reading and writing.
“We know that readers become writers and writers become readers.”
Policies and Overviews
Reading Question Stems
Shakespeare Class Reader- coverage linked to Subjects, British Values and SMSC
World Book Day 2024! The children loved dressing up! During the day, they shared their favourite stories and made their own reading recommendations. Some classes chose to create reading for Pleasure videos. Keep a look out for these!The Shakespeare Book Swap was a huge hit and everyone loved taking home a new book to share.
Some of our KS2 School Council members visited Red Marsh Primary School as part of their Story Telling Week. Whilst they were there, they learnt to use 'Makaton' to tell a story (they were amazing!), took part in hot seating activities and enjoyed a tour of their school. The children loved sharing hot chocolate and finding out about eachother. It was lovely to be able to make new friends from our local community. We can't wait for Red Marsh to visit us at Shakespeare soon.
JG entered the 'Young Writers' competition with this amazing entry! He loved sharing his text and reading it aloud to 3A and 3S. We think we have an 'Author' in the making here! https://www.youngwriters.co.uk/competitions
Year 1 have enjoyed reading The Sound Collector poem by Roger McGough. They collected sounds from around the classroom and made their own poems.
In English year 2 have been reading ‘The Colour Monster’ They have been interviewing each other during hot seating sessions to discuss people’s feelings and how we can make people feel better.
In English we have been reading the story Esiotrot and we have LOVED it! Today we met Miss Hickson's tortoise!! He was very cute xx
In year 3 we have been predicting what we think may happen in our new story 'The Journey'. We used magnifying glasses to take a close look at clues on the front cover.
Year 3-Today in comprehension we worked in teams to read a piece of text and answer questions all about Mary Anning. We have loved learning all about this famous palaeontologist in our Science lessons too.
Oh how busy we have been in EYFS! It was Pancake Day on Tuesday so we absolutely had to read Mr.Wolf's Pancakes! In Class R we are very helpful. We have written a shopping list for him and worked in groups to write a set of instructions to help him make his pancakes.
Year 5 really enjoyed World Book Day.
In Year 3 we love to share our work with our friends by reading it out to the class.
Year 6. As part of our read and respond comprehension lessons, the children discuss the meaning of new words, write down ideas and learn to explore all types of texts before answering questions with growing confidence.
