English: Reading

Intent: Enabling our children to access the world around them and develop a love of reading.

At Hillside we prioritise reading as a fundamental skill that our children require in order to access the broader curriculum and the world around them. There is explicit teaching of core reading strategies and cohesive learning approaches building conceptual fluency and preparing children for future demands of reading at secondary school.

Children begin their reading journey through our systematic synthetic phonics programme, Read Write Inc. and develop their comprehension skills through our ambitious reading curriculum. Underpinned by CUSP Reading, our curriculum progressively develops children's skills in retrieval, inference and explanation as well as vocabulary and language development.  It exposes children to high quality ambitious texts which challenge their thinking and develop their range of experience.  These texts have been mapped carefully to ensure a breadth of experiences, authors, texts and themes across the primary years,  including core poems that each year group will study in detail such as The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe.  These texts represent a promise from the school to every pupil that it serves, of the literature that it is committed to studying throughout a pupils' school journey. 

Children’s reading fluency is closely monitored by the class teacher and once children have completed the school’s phonics programme they will continue to bring home a reading book appropriate to their reading level. In addition to this, children choose a second book to bring home and either read independently or share with an adult or sibling. 

Opportunities to develop children’s love of reading come through the use of our wonderful school library, visits to other local libraries, author visits, themed book events and the use of exciting texts across our wider curriculum.