Our Vision

“Hope: building for a brighter future”

At North Star, children learn to read and then read to learn, enabling them to access all areas of the curriculum and reach their potential in life. We believe it is our duty to ensure that every child develops a love of reading, books and stories. As well as helping with cognitive development and raising education standards across the curriculum, reading helps us to learn more about ourselves, the world and the people around us. It helps us to imagine and empathise. It can inform us and entertain us. It can make us stop and think, or can inspire us. Reading is at the heart of our curriculum.

Curriculum Aims

At North Star, we aim for all of our children to be able to:

• read fluently, confidently and with good understanding,
• read aloud with confidence, expression and clarity
• develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
• acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
• appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
• use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas
• be competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate

To achieve these aims, we will:

• have reading as a top priority in our school
• have high expectations for all children
• explicitly teach rich vocabulary across the school curriculum, valuing language and its use to communicate ideas effectively and creatively
• provide a reading spine of varied, highquality texts that are rich in culture, heritage and diversity, and which act for children as a mirror to themselves and a window to the world around them
• provide children with a wellsequenced curriculum that builds knowledge and skills over time, giving the best opportunity to develop and succeed.
• develop children’s empathy and understanding of the world through the texts and genres explored, giving children an opportunity to express and develop their understanding.
• prioritise quality first teaching for all, adapting curriculum content and lessons plans as necessary to ensure progress and fulfilment for all children.
• promote a love of reading