English
Reading
Our reading curriculum is sequenced and designed to ensure pupils are engaged, enthused, fluent, and expressive readers who can use a range of comprehension skills.
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Reading Curriculum 24-25 | [pdf 2MB] |
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Reading Comprehension
Teaching Strategies We Implement
We aim to develop pupils’ language capability to support their reading and writing. Purposeful speaking and listening activities support the development of pupils’ language capability and provides a foundation for thinking and communication. Purposeful activities at Kelsey include:
- reading books aloud and discussing them;
- activities that extend pupils’ expressive and receptive vocabulary; collaborative learning activities where pupils can share their thought processes;
- structured questioning to develop reading comprehension;
- teachers modelling inference-making by thinking aloud; and
- pupils articulating their ideas verbally before they start writing.
We aim to support pupils to develop fluent reading capabilities. Fluent reading supports comprehension because pupils’ cognitive resources are freed from focusing on word recognition and can be redirected towards comprehending the text. This can be developed through:
- guided oral reading instruction - teachers model fluent reading of a text, then pupils read the same text aloud with appropriate feedback; and
We aim to teach reading comprehension strategies through modelling and supported practice. Reading comprehension can be improved by teaching specific strategies that pupils can apply both to monitor and overcome barriers to comprehension. These include:
- prediction;
- questioning;
- clarifying;
- summarising;
- inference; and
- activating prior knowledge.
The strategies are described and modelled before pupils practise the strategies with feedback. Support will then be gradually reduced as pupils take increasing responsibility.
In response to recent national research we therefore give children daily comprehension opportunities to learn and practice reading skills such as retrieval, inference and summarising. This allows us to assess pupils' reading development to ensure they can fully engage with curriculum texts.
How our KS2 reading curriculum builds on the learning from phonics and reading in KS1 can be found below:
Reading for Pleasure
Reading is a lifelong skill that provides opportunities to learn, be informed and be entertained. The Department for Education (DfE) believes that reading allows children to “acquire knowledge and to build on what they already know” (DfE, 2013, p. 3). The Centre for Learning in Primary Education (CLPE, 2014) suggests that educators are key in promoting this skill among children. "Educators, who immerse themselves in the interests of young readers to create relationships with children around their reading habits, can greatly increase children’s reading development" (Cremin, 2009; Cremin et al, 2019).
However, learning to read is just the beginning. For children to become lifelong readers, teachers have to "nurture their engagement in reading" (Bearne and Reedy, 2018). With reading providing “a chance to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually” (DfE, 2013, p. 3), teachers promoting an engagement in reading can ensure children are given this chance. Engagement in reading is also considered as reading enjoyment and reading for pleasure (RfP), due to a desire in choosing to read and the fulfilment obtained from reading (Cremin, 2014).
Therefore at Kelsey we put a lot of work into developing pupils reading for pleasure. This slideshow demonstrates how we are creating opportunities for pupils to develop positive reading habits.
Reading prompts for parents when listening to your child read...
The following documents have useful advice and generic questions to ask your child to check their understanding of the book they are reading at home:
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Top Reading Tips - For All Parents | [pdf 2MB] |
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Reading Prompts - All parents | [pdf 286KB] |
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Reading Prompts - EYFS, KS1 | [pdf 226KB] |
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Reading Pompts KS2 - Inference | [pdf 29KB] |
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Phonics and Early Reading
Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) developed for schools by schools. Based on the original Letters and Sounds, but extensively revised to provide a complete teaching programme meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum.
It aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.
For more information, speak to your child's class teacher or see their website.
Our agreed school expectations for achievement in phonics for Reception - Year 1 can be found below...
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Programme-Overview Reception-and-Year-1 Phonics Progression | [pdf 567KB] |
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Writing
Intent
Our writing curriculum is designed to ensure that writers are:
- rich in vocabulary and bold in their language choices
- clear, accurate and coherent with a sound knowledge of the correct use of grammar, punctuation and spelling
- able to adapt their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences
Teaching Strategies We Implement
We follow the Nelson Handwriting scheme.
We have adopted the Talk4Writing teaching framework approach which enables children to imitate the language they need for a particular topic orally, before reading and analysing it, and then writing their own version.
Active Spelling embeds learning in an active and engaging way, providing pupils with a deeper grasp of spelling and vocabulary that serves as a foundation for their future. This has been thoroughly designed and is underpinned by research with a significant impact upon the outcomes in spelling ages so far.
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Writing Curriculum 2024-2025 | [docx 516KB] |
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