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Brackenwood Junior School

Reading Curriculum at Brackenwood Junior School

At Brackenwood Junior School, we put Reading at the centre of every child’s learning. We recognise the significance of language, communication, reading and writing in all aspects of life, from developing independent learning skills to successfully entering the world of work. We place high-quality texts at the heart of our curriculum and encourage children to develop their love of reading through our Reading for Pleasure initiatives. Experiential learning opportunities and a vocabulary-rich learning environment feed directly into children’s writing outcomes.

We aim to instil a passion for books and love of reading for every child from the start of their journey at Brackenwood Juniors with the ambition to be a fluent and life-long reader. We aim to ensure every child is a confident decoder with a maturing understanding and passion for books. We build upon this fluency by focussing upon further improving comprehension and language in KS2 through a range of learning. We intend to develop confident readers that continue to develop a love of books which educate, challenge and enthral them throughout their time at Brackenwood Juniors and beyond.  

At our school, we have used the EEF ‘Improving Literacy in KS2’, Ofsted Curriculum research reviews and followed DfE guidance to support our approach to the teaching of reading across school. We aim to ensure our curriculum promotes ambition, consistency, progression and develops best practice across school. 

We recognise that where there is under achievement, we need to address it through ‘catch up programmes and interventions that deliver results for our children and close the achievement gap.

Text choices and class story time

High-quality texts have been carefully selected as stimuli for writing for each year group. These texts are varied, age appropriate yet challenging where fitting and they hook our pupils in. The texts for our writing units are read during our daily class story time and they promote a passion and love of reading. Being read to on a daily basis helps are pupils to learn how to control the pace and intonation of their reading. To ensure staff are immersed in the learning, they read the texts prior to teaching and planning from them. The enthusiasm for the books then shines through our staff and pupils. Where possible, we have chosen texts where we can engage with the authors, for example, via author visits or by Tweeting them. This further engages our children with reading them. 

Reading volunteers

We welcome reading volunteers within our school community to help create fluent and enthusiastic readers who are aware of how to control the pace and intonation of their reading due to practising these skills. Their passion and love of books is infectious for our children and we very much value the time that they give each week in helping us. Each class has a volunteer who reads with both non-fluent and fluent readers. As a school, we are always looking to further expand our number of volunteers. Please contact our school office if you can offer your time at Brackenwood Juniors. schooloffice@brackemwood-junior.wirral.sch.uk 

Daily reading

Within each day, pupils have the chance to read their books. They have access to banded Oxford Owl reading books for non-fluent readers as well as to our Starbooks books for fluent readers.

Reading for pleasure – Starbooks and home reading

For our fluent readers, we have our Starbooks Reading Spine. Pupils take books home to read and once they have read a book, they get a signature on their loyalty card. There are various rewards throughout to help promote reading for pleasure. We strongly encourage our families to read the Starbooks books together to instil of love of reading in our children. The Starbooks Reading Spine encourages children to read a wide range of books once they are fluent readers and for them to build a reading habit for life. Our Spine is built around Doug Lemov’s research. 

‘Books expose children to more facts and to a broader vocabulary than virtually any other activity, and persuasive data indicates that people who read for pleasure enjoy cognitive benefits throughout their lifetime.’ – Daniel T. Willingham

CPD

Through regular monitoring, our Reading Lead and SLT identify staff who need further CPD. This is then provided in a timely manner and closely monitored to ensure staff feel confident and competent at delivering lessons and learning. In addition to targeted CPD, all staff receive CPD throughout the academic year during staff meetings and through meetings with our Reading Lead. Our Reading Lead seeks staff feedback with regard to where they feel they need additional support and then feeds that in to future training. 

Comprehension

Daily half an hour reading comprehension lessons promote retrieval of learning so that it embeds and pupils make progress. Our intent is to use a mastery approach where all children can access quality, age-related texts and become increasingly confident and competent in the way they are able to think about texts and express their thoughts as the scaffolds are removed. The long term plan for each year group is centred round texts from the Literacy Shed Plus which are lexically appropriate and challenging for the age of our pupils and they focus on all of the content domains in a way that also promotes retrieval of learning. In addition to following our long term plan, class teachers, with the support of our Reading Lead, analyse summative assessments in order to identify learning gaps. These are then taught to within the following term in order for our pupils to make optimum progress. 

As a school, we appreciate how important it is to read increasingly complex texts to further develop comprehension. Reading a wide range of texts and encountering texts in different forms helps are pupils further improve comprehension. For our pupils, it is essential that we expose them to a wealth of knowledge of our World even if they do not necessary have first-hand experiences of this.   

Assessment

Once our pupils can phonetically decode effectively, we focus on building fluency and comprehension skills.

Built into our assessment overview are termly summative assessment windows which support us in tracking pupil progress as well as identifying learning gaps which become focus areas during the following term. 

During lessons, formative assessment is embedded to maximise pupil progress. 

In addition, we complete Salford Reading assessments throughout the year as well as Reading Fluency assessments. This enables us to target support to increases the number of words per minute our children can read. It also ensures that our non-fluent readers are reading books at an appropriate level and that fluent readers continue to remain fluent and thrive with their reading. 

In Year 6, pupils complete past SAT papers as part of their summative assessments before they take their End of Key Stage 2 Reading SAT paper in May. 

Termly pupil progress meetings allow staff to target support to pupils are need to make more progress so that the gap between them and their peers does not widen. 

Mystery readers

In Year 3 and 4, we welcome parents, carers and other family members to come into school as Mystery Readers to share some of their children’s favourite books. This helps to promote reading for pleasure and a love of reading. Further information regarding this is sent out directly to Year 3 and 4 parents and carers about what it is and how to sign up. 

Promoting Reading for Pleasure and connecting with our families

  • ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ is incorporated into our classrooms – often when hooking children in to a new class text. 

  • During the Autumn Term, we have a Reading Roadshow, which promotes a love of books and reading for pleasure. As part of this event, we invite our community into school for an evening filled with books, authors, drama, local book shops, crafts, a raffle and more! 

  • We also raise vital funds for more books for our school by running an annual book fair. 

  • World Book Day/Week is always an exciting time in our school where we participate in book-related activities and they get a book voucher. 

  • During the summer holidays, we share the Summer Reading Challenge with our children so that they continue to read and have a love of books over their break from school.

  • Sponsored reading events. 

  • Twitter

  • PTA Fair with a book stall

  • Preloved books for families to take home

‘There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.’ – Walt Disney