Reading – Intent

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, high-quality 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 well-sequenced 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

Values

Christian: compassion, kindness & respect                    Learning: curiosity, ambition, resilience & perseverance

Through reading lessons at North Star, children will develop their compassion and empathy when reading about different issues, cultures and experiences, presented from different points of view (fiction and non-fiction). In turn, this will enable them to become kind and respectful members of society.

Ambitious and varied texts in reading lessons and across the curriculum will help to provide a window to the wider world, inspiring children’s curiosity, and promoting ambition for their own learning and writing.

Reading – Implementation

At North Star, we follow the curriculum structure of CUSP (Curriculum with Unity Schools Partnership), which draws on academic research and incorporates Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction (see Curriculum Policy).

Long-term planning

Texts are high-quality and intentionally varied, mapped to ensure a balance of heritage texts and those with diverse authors and/or protagonists, or covering specific social, ethical or moral issues.

The teaching and practice of reading skills is intentionally balanced to meet the development of children’s reading, with early readers spending more time focussing on decoding (to develop sight reading and automaticity) and retrieval (retrieving information from a text) and older readers have a diet with more inference (reading ‘between the lines’ to understand what a text really means, not just what it says), summarising and predicting.

Phases of a lesson

• ‘Explain’ – new material (including high-quality vocabulary) is introduced in small steps to support the effectiveness of the working memory and avoid cognitive overload (small steps)
• ‘Fluency’ – explicit teaching and intentional practice for children of reading with fluency and expression - prosody
• ‘Example’ – teaching staff clearly model the application of the learning so children know what to do and how to apply their knowledge (modelling)
• ‘Attempt’ – teaching staff guide pupils through a further example, using purposeful questioning (questioning) and effective examples to address misconceptions (checking for understanding)
• ‘Apply’ – purposeful, independent practice reduces the load on the working memory (independent practice) while still achieving a high success rate
• ‘Challenge’ – all children are given the opportunity to deepen their knowledge and understanding of new content by applying it in a different way

Spiritual development

Through reading at North Star, we enable spiritual development by sharing rich and varied texts with the children, texts which provide a window to the world around and which inspire empathy and curiosity as well as an appreciation of the beauty of language.

Inclusion/support for all

High-quality modelling enables all children to make progress. We use a range of scaffolding strategies to support children who are working towards or below age related expectations, including pre-reading, reducing text quantity and using sentence stems or technology to support with answering questions. Teachers provide and gradually remove these scaffolds as the children require. Teachers can also use flexible grouping to provide further support within lessons.

Phonics

Little Wandle Letters & Sounds is North Star’s systematic synthetic phonics programme. It is an ambitious, high-quality, DfE approved programme that supports all children from reception to year 2 to read. Sessions are daily, pupils work within ability groups and their reading books are fully decodable based on their phonics knowledge to allow for development of fluency, automaticity, expression and comprehension.

Reading – Impact

Accelerated Reader

Using the Accelerated Reader program, children who have completed the phonics programme undertake termly ‘Star Reader’ assessments. These online, multiple-choice questions generate reading levels (e.g. 2.5 – 3.6) which correlate to the organisation of our school library. These levels increase as children’s reading improves. Once a book is read (two or three times in the case of shorter books), children take a ‘reading practice’ quiz (5-10 multiple-choice questions) about the book. If they achieve 100%, they can stamp their reading bingo card and ultimately earn a book prize in our weekly celebration worship.

Teachers

Informal, formative assessment of pupils’ learning and progress is a part of every interaction between teacher and child, including in reading lessons. Teachers’ practice here is supported by more formal assessments.

Children in reception and year 1 sit half-termly phonics assessments. Children in Years 2 to 6 will sit termly assessments for reading, using either past KS1 or KS2 SATs papers or PiXL diagnostic papers. Data from these assessments is used formatively to check for progress and gaps in children’s attainment which means that teachers can plan future learning accordingly. We adopt a ‘keep up, not catch up’ philosophy, proactively using regular interventions (e.g. additional phonics sessions or Precision Teaching of high-frequency words) to support children’s learning and keep them on track to meet age-related expectations.

Teachers use class work and assessments together to make a termly summative assessment for individual children to assess whether they are on track to meet or have met the age-related expected outcomes. Data is recorded in our in-school tracking system and is used at Pupil Progress Meetings so that we can track the progress of all pupils, identifying areas where more progress needs to be made.

Subject leader

North Star’s subject leader(s) has first responsibility for monitoring the quality of teaching and learning, for making and enacting plans to improve the same, and for reporting to governors. They do this in various ways, typically with a specific focus for the monitoring activity:

• Learning walks/lesson drop ins – short observations of lessons
• Book looks – reviewing a sample of books/work from across the school
• Collecting pupil voice – speaking to a cross-section of children about their learning
• Professional discussions with staff – formally and informally, through reporting and check-in chats

Governors

Federation governors play an important role in receiving reports from subject and school leaders, visiting school to observe the experiences of our children and holding school leaders to account on their school improvement planning and the quality of education in our Federation.

Statutory assessment

Pupils in year 1 will sit the ‘phonics screening check’ in June in each year. Children who do not pass the screening check will resit in June of year 2. Pupils in year 6 will sit the national end of key stage assessments (SATs) for reading in May each year. The outcome of these assessments are reported to parents with the pupils’ annual reports at the end of the summer term.