Reading

At our school, we use a number of different strategies to promote a child’s love of books and encourage them to become confident, independent readers. Children are provided with many opportunities to read, enjoy and share books as well as being immersed in language rich environments with access to a breadth of vocabulary and print.

In Reception and Key Stage 1, reading is taught through daily phonics lessons using the ‘Read Write Inc’ phonics programme. More information can be found here. (add link to phonics page)

Once this programme has been completed (usually by Year 2), children move on to Hackney’s Destination Reader programme. This approach to teaching reading focuses on:

• Key reading strategies, which support comprehension
• Learning behaviours, which support pupil talk

Daily sessions include whole class modelling prior to the children applying these skills through partner work and independent reading. Every lesson, children use our Destination Reader bookmark to support them in unpicking and understanding texts in a meaningful way. You can find a copy of this bookmark, which includes the learning behaviours, key reading strategies and accompanying sentence stems uploaded on this page.

On top of the daily reading lessons being taught across the school, we provide children with many other opportunities to develop and strengthen their reading skills.

• A focus text used in literacy lessons, linked to their topic and/or our curriculum drivers
• A class text, which is read aloud by the teacher
• DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) sessions – a 10 minute session where children enjoy their chosen reading book
• Home reading books and a reading diary to record in
• Meeting real life authors