Four Oaks Primary School

At Four Oaks we are readers! We want our children to love reading. We want them to have no limits to what their ambitions are and grow up wanting to be authors, editors, librarians or educators. We want them to embody our core values and all “strive to be the best we can be”. We want our children to remember their reading lessons in our school, to cherish these memories and embrace the reading opportunities they are presented with!

At Four Oaks Primary School our main aim is for every child to become a fluent reader and staff are determined to ensure that all our children receive the rigour and support to enable them to achieve this. We want children to become fluent readers in order for them to reach age related expectations or to make accelerated progress from their starting point. Additionally, we want children to develop a love for reading and to read for pleasure regularly. Research shows that reading for pleasure is the single biggest indicator of a child’s future success – more than family circumstances, socio-economic background, or a parent’s educational background (National Literacy Trust).

Our reading curriculum is designed to reflect the diversity and beauty of our school and the community we serve, and we want all of our pupils to be able to see themselves in a book. Consequently, we have carefully curated our reading spine to meet the needs of the pupils in our school and to promote and defend the protected characteristics (Equality Act 2010).

The aims of teaching reading in our school are to develop pupils who:

• show high levels of achievement and exhibit very positive attitudes towards reading;
• rapidly acquire a secure knowledge of letters and sounds and make sustained progress in learning to read fluently through our systematic synthetic phonics program, Read Write Inc;
• read easily and fluently with good understanding across fiction, non-fiction and poetry;
• acquire a wider vocabulary;
• provide a wide range of texts to provide experiences and knowledge to support deeper understanding of a text;
• engage fully in a wide range of texts that support the developing reader including archaic language, non-linear time sequences, narratively complex, figurative/symbolic texts and resistant texts (Doug Lemov, 5 Plagues of the Developing reader) [See our 5 Plagues of the Developing Reader Document];
• develop good comprehension, drawing from their linguistic knowledge;
• develop their reading across the curriculum to support pupils’ acquisition of knowledge;
• read for pleasure both at home and school on a regular basis;
• use reading to become immersed in other worlds, both real and imagined;
• through their reading develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually
• develop a lifelong love of reading.

Our reading curriculum promotes curiosity and a love and thirst for learning. It is carefully curated and deliberate choices are made with consideration to the quality of the text, challenge, themes, vocabulary and whether it is ambitious for all pupils. We want our text choices to empower our children to become independent and resilient readers. We want to equip them with not only the statutory requirements of the reading National Curriculum but to prepare them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life by creating lifelong readers.

We want our children to use the vibrancy of our community and of our great city to learn from other cultures, respect diversity, co-operate with one another and appreciate what they have. We achieve this by providing a strong SMSC curriculum and complement this learning by studying a wide range of books which show a wide representation of communities and cover a variety of social issues. We have celebrated Pride History month in February and children had opportunities to read books celebrating inclusion and diversity and offering them a broader awareness of what families can look like. One pupil commented,

The books are really interesting. I read ‘All About Families’ and I liked it because it shows what lots of different families can be like and that it’s ok to be different.”

To ensure high standards of teaching and learning in reading, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school. Reading is taught throughout the week in all Key Stages, with Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 focusing on knowledge and skills stated in the National Curriculum.

Our Reception children start their reading journey through our systematic phonics programme, Read Write Inc. Pupils are taught letter sounds and how to blend and segment to read simple words and sentences matched to the sounds learnt.  Phonics teaching, whole class story sessions, quiet reading times and opportunities for the children to explore a wide variety of good quality texts within the environment all contribute to the understanding that the groups of letters on a page make up words and that these words carry meaning.  Children learn letter sounds and how to blend these sounds in order to read words, phrases and books that contain the sounds taught.

During Year 1, pupils build on work from the Early Years Foundation Stage.  Pupils continue to follow the Read Write Inc. phonics programme and are taught to sound out and blend unfamiliar words quickly and accurately by using their ever-developing phonic knowledge and skills.  Our language rich environment combined with a wide variety of high-quality texts, allow children to understand that the letters on a page represent words and promotes and instils a love of reading. During Year 2 there is a continued focus on developing pupils’ accurate and speedy word reading skills.  Pupils are exposed to a wider range of texts including stories, traditional tales, poems, plays and non-fiction, and encouraged to discuss these in whole class, group and individual situations. High-quality, engaging, cross-curricular texts are used in lessons to continue to develop pupils’ love of reading.

In addition to the daily phonics session, children in KS1 participate in reading lessons five times a week. Year 1 and Year 2 are exposed to books they can decode as well as ‘real’ books that are read to them in order to be exposed to more complex plots and characters. Using two different levels of books helps children develop both fluency in reading and their comprehension skills. KS1 guided reading sessions follow a structure designed to help children develop both their reading fluency and stamina and their reading comprehension skills to create rounded confident readers. It is in Year 2 when we have a renewed focus on reading fluency, particularly once children are off the RWInc programme as we understand the importance of them being ready to engage with the demands of an ambitious KS2 curriculum.

During Key Stage 2, as children’s decoding skills become increasingly secure, the focus moves from the teaching of word reading to the development of vocabulary and comprehension. High-quality, inspirational and, where appropriate, topic related texts are always used in reading lessons and books are chosen that will expose children to a wide range of vocabulary and stimulate discussion about new words and phrases. Teaching is directed increasingly towards developing the depth and breadth of children’s reading habits helping to ensure that they become independent, frequent and enthusiastic readers.

At Four Oaks we use a whole class reading approach to teach reading in KS2. Whole class Reading sessions take place at least four times a week and provide children with the opportunity to develop their reading skills in relation to the reading content domains and objectives set out in the NC2014. (See Reading Progression Map for further details). Within sessions, our teachers model reading skills narrating their thoughts aloud to support pupils to access the text and practise reading and responding in challenging ways. This will involve a variety of strategies such as whole class talk, pair or small group talk and individual thinking. Additionally, pupils are given opportunities to read texts independently but are also regularly exposed to adults reading as experts, modelling prosodic reading and fluency.

Texts to be read in the KS2 reading lessons, are selected based on the KS2 whole class reading thread. The thread sets out a set of books for each year group per half term. These threads are created around a ‘core text’ which sets a theme for reading. This theme may be linked to a topic in a foundation subject, to the English writing focus for the term or a PSHE issue. Where a purposeful link cannot be made to another area of the curriculum, texts have been selected because they are of a good quality and will provide children with exposure to a range of authors and writing styles they may not otherwise encounter. The reading threads include examples of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and picture books.

We believe that by crafting our curriculum this way, we improve the potential for our children to retain what they have been taught, to alter their long-term memory and thus improve the rates of progress they make. We also believe that by exposing them to a wide variety of texts, authors and genres they will discover there is a book for everyone and become lifelong readers.

Bringing reading alive is important at Four Oaks Primary School. We enrich the children’s time in our school with memorable, unforgettable experiences and provide opportunities which are normally out of reach – this piques their interests and passions. We invite storytellers, performers, poets and authors into school and we take part in author zoom sessions to ensure children have opportunities to experience different authors reading and discussing extracts from their own books and poetry. One pupil commented on a Michael Rosen zoom, “I loved it! It inspired me to search more about poems and write some poetry of my own at home!”

Additionally, all children had opportunities to work with a storyteller in school and we used him to help us to immerse our children in Shakespeare week by focussing on their chosen play and to do some drama around a key scene in the play. Children had opportunities to also practise using some Shakespearean language. One KS2 child commented, “He’s great and I really liked the acting we did for our play (Shakespeare week) and we started to read and speak like the actors did in Shakespeare’s plays!”

The children speak very enthusiastically about reading and the reading opportunities in school, both during their English lessons and in foundation subjects. They enjoy reading a range of genres within lessons and as part of reading for pleasure opportunities. 

Reading in our school is progressive and planned to meet the needs of all children. Assessments are carried out regularly to ensure children are accessing books at an appropriate level and are being challenged in their reading. This type of on-going assessment is the responsibility of class teachers. At the same time, we provide books and other reading materials to ensure that children read for pleasure and learn to love reading.

If children are keeping pace with their year group curriculum, they are deemed to be making expected progress, or more than expected progress if they started from a low entry point.

We use both formative and summative assessment information in every reading lesson. Staff use this information to inform their short-term planning and short-term interventions. Additionally, our assessments enable staff to adapt teaching to suit the needs of the class in the moment. This helps us provide the best possible support for all our pupils, including the more able.

We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

• Listening to children read;
• NGRT reading assessments;
• Completing Read Write Inc phonics-based assessments (EYFS and KS1);
• Completing PM benchmarking (KS2);
• Comprehension activities;
• Interviewing the pupils about their learning (pupil voice);
• Termly reporting of standards across the curriculum;
• Analysis of termly standardised tests;
• End of Key stage SATs results.