Reading for Pleasure
We also believe in immersing children in the joy of reading.
Each class has a class library with books that align with our reading strategy.
- For Year R, the class library is part of the wider provision when children have an opportunity for child-initiated learning. To accompany their decodable text, the children are also given an allocated book for pleasure. This is for their people at home to read TO them after they have practiced reading with their decodable text. We have made the decision to curate a list of picture books we would like the children in Foundation Stage to have been exposed to by the time they reach Year 1. The EYFS team, change these books each week.
- Children in Year 1 use their class library to choose reading books for pleasure which their people at home read TO them after they have practiced reading their decodable text. This gives them an element of choice, developing early reading for pleasure habits around preference.
- Children who are now able to access Accelerated Reader and require a decodable text follow the same approach as Year 1 children. We have also ensured that texts between the range of 0 and 1.0 within Accelerated Reader are also decodable, so that we can provide children with the challenge of reading a text they can answer questions on but also ensuring they can be successful when reading too.
Years 2 to 6: The class libraries contain books which are on the Accelerated Reader system. The children have free choice of a number of books within their range. If a child choose a book outside of their range, we do not discourage this but we try to guide them to a more suitable text. This is to ensure that there is careful consideration given when finding the right balance between choosing a book that interests them and choosing a book that will ensure they can read successfully and confidently.
Reading for Progress
At Brickhill Primary School, we believe that reading is fundamental to unlocking many aspects of the curriculum and has the ability to empower our children to access the wider world around them. Reading can provide a breadth of learning and enjoyment and therefore we must support them in being able to access this. We do this by first ensuring the children have the phonic knowledge needed to decode and accurately read the words on the page (see the phonics section for more information on how we teach this). We then must provide children with more opportunities to become more fluent readers. Then, when they are able to independently access a text they are reading, will they be in the best position to comprehend what they have read.
We have adopted CUSP Reading to support our children in developing as successful readers, who are exposed to high-quality texts. The structure of a CUSP Reading lesson has been carefully designed to ensure that pupils receive a coherent, balanced and meaningful reading experience in every block. While the CUSP Reading curriculum is rooted in children reading whole, high-quality texts, we also recognise the importance of reading broadly so that pupils have the knowledge and skills to access reading in the wider curriculum. While it is impossible to isolate individual reading competencies, each day has been designed to target key competencies in the way that pupils respond to what they have read.
To further develop reading comprehension skills and also to give the teachers feedback in terms of the children’s reading, we use Accelerated Reader. This enables children to answer comprehension questions after reading each text and also provides some soft data for fluency development for years 2 to 5.
Key components of CUSP Reading:
Reading lessons in KS2
The Key Stage 1 structure is built on the same principles as Key Stage 2. Pupils still read a core text and additional supplementary texts. Explicit vocabulary instruction, reading fluency and thinking hard are the same key pillars of the Key Stage 1 curriculum. Pupils focus first on understanding the detail of the text before moving into thinking hard about what they have read.
The key difference is in timetabling. We know that a strong and robust phonics curriculum is an essential part of excellent reading provision. To ensure that schools have sufficient time to deliver this, the CUSP offer for Reading and Writing is based on one 50 minute English lesson per day, with daily phonics teaching in addition to this.
Over a 2-week period, pupils studying the CUSP Reading curriculum would have 5 Reading lessons and 5 Writing lessons. Pupils would still write at sentence level in their Reading lessons and read in every Writing lesson. The balance across the term ensures that pupils have time to engage deeply with high-quality reading and writing experiences.
You can find supporting documents below that provide additional detail about CUSP Reading: