Mary Exton Primary School

Reading

Mr Ritson is our English Subject Leader

We love reading!  Reading gives us the basis for all learning whilst also allowing us to visit other countries and get lost in other worlds.  We strive for children to read with fluency and understanding and for them to become long-life readers who enjoy and value books.  Reading and writing are taught in a co-ordinated way and are the key to enabling children to access and progress across the whole curriculum.  Pupils are given opportunities to read for both information and pleasure.  They experience high quality literature and hear a broad range of ambitious and challenging language in lessons.

Implementation: 

At Mary Exton we use the National Curriculum and Herts for Learning (HfL) Long Term overviews.  We currently follow The Letters and Sounds SSP. We use the HfL Reading Planning Platforms and end of year TAFs which provide a consistent expectation of standards, together with learning objectives for the teaching of reading, which map the progression in skills across the Primary Age.    Through the teaching of phonics, individual reading, reading aloud, guided reading and whole class reading sessions we create opportunities to practise and consolidate reading skills on a weekly basis.  Early Years and KS1 have daily dedicated phonic lessons. Children from Y1 to Y4 have 3 weekly timetabled guided reading lessons that last approximately 20 minutes.  Children in Y5 and Y6 have 3 whole class reading sessions per week.  All classes have small group adult led reading sessions to develop children's reading skills weekly.  These lessons involve a range of different activities and will often depend on the skills  that the children need to focus on to progress with their reading.   All children are heard to read at least once a week during small group guided reading sessions.    Identified children will take part in precision teaching interventions based on specific barriers to learning to support their phonics learning and application, reading fluency and reading comprehension skills.  In addition to this and depending on specific needs, pre-teaching and booster sessions are opened to all children within KS2 on a daily basis.  Daily English lessons include both reading and writing.  We use texts matched to the children's age, attainment and ability.  We have a list of core texts to cover per year group and use the Literary Curriculum to support our choice of book-based comprehension texts for reading sessions.

Impact: 

To ensure that all children learn to read by the time they leave Mary Exton - reducing the gap between children from language-rich homes and others.  

Curriculum Overview