Our School Vision:

Our school is a community where each person is valued as a child of God. We are a Church of England school, inspired and guided by the life and teaching of Jesus. We work together to create a caring, friendly and safe school family, to enable the whole school community to flourish and each person reach their full God-given potential.

This document is devised to support this vision, and has the following intentions:

· Pupils are empowered to develop the hope and perseverance necessary to engage the challenges of reading in the context of school and the wider world.

· Teaching staff seek out every opportunity to ensure that all pupils flourish in Reading lessons, developing wisdom and creativity through an ambitious and broad curriculum that challenges expectations, deepens knowledge and develops skills.

· Reading lessons are inclusive, so everyone is valued and respected – and tolerance and diversity are celebrated

Intent

At Donnington Wood CE Junior School, we believe that reading is at the heart of our curriculum. We acknowledge the vital importance of reading in order for children to flourish and succeed across the curriculum. We want to empower children to develop a love of reading and become lifelong readers. We firmly believe that instilling a love for reading is essential for a child’s comprehensive understanding and appreciation of the world. We see reading as a gateway for children to explore beyond their immediate knowledge, engage in diverse cultural experiences, and expand their vocabulary to effectively express themselves. Our reading curriculum is designed to nurture a lifelong passion for reading. We focus on cultivating habits that foster discerning readership, encouraging frequent and extensive reading while employing self-regulation strategies and encouraging discussions about the material read. Our curriculum encompasses various approaches including synthetic phonics, shared and guided reading, home reading, independent reading opportunities, and daily exposure to quality texts read aloud. These components collectively provide the diverse opportunities necessary for developing fluent, enthusiastic, and critical readers.

Through our reading curriculum we aim:

· All children will leave Donnington Wood Junior School able to read.

· Reading lies at the core of our curriculum.

· To equip children with the reading skills necessary to flourish across the curriculum.

· To encourage children to read widely, both in school and at home.

· To use reading to help with children’s mental health and wellbeing.

Implementation

Our reading curriculum focuses on using an age-appropriate text for children to explore the VIPERS reading skills of vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval and summarising. They read a variety of texts over their school journey and will be equipped with the skills needed to read widely and accurately.

Children are given time daily for both structured reading lessons and to read their own chosen books for pleasure.

· Reading for pleasure is championed by all teaching staff and special events are held termly to celebrate reading. Children have 15 minutes per day for reading for pleasure.

· Use of the Accelerated Reader system to give children an accurate reading age. This means their chosen books are at the right level for them.

· Teachers engage children with a class story and ensure they all experience being read aloud to.

· Teaching is based around a wide variety of text types and genres to ensure all children will find something they love to read.

· Confidence and stamina are developed through listening to pupils read during fluency lessons and for ten minutes at the start of every lesson.

· Children engage with peer reading to experience a variety of texts and enjoy reading with others.

· Reading intervention for phonetic decoding using the Read Write Inc programme is in place to ensure no child leaves our school without the ability to read.

· Reading lessons across all year groups have a clear skill focus that links to our VIPERS timetable, which ensures the key reading skills are being covered and that all pupils are familiar with the lesson sequence.

· Engagement in Reading lessons is encouraged using texts which appeal to children and are of an appropriate pitch.

· Interventions are put in place where children need additional support or practice.

· Lessons based on cold texts are used to build familiarity with the exam format of identifying which skill to use.

· Scaffolds, page numbers and sentence stems are used to help pupils locate and structure their answers.

· Children engage with a wide range of text types, including texts which celebrate diversity. They will read texts about inspirational people, those from other cultures and those with disabilities or learning difficulties.

Impact

By the end of Key Stage 2, we aspire that our Reading curriculum will have had the following impact on pupils:

· Children will enjoy reading and are able to apply their reading skills across the curriculum.

· Children know how to use the VIPERS reading skills in order to interpret a wide range of texts.

· Children will read fluently, with expression and are able to comprehend what they have read.

· Weekly cold reads will show that children are able to apply their taught reading skills to unseen material.