Our aim at Rectory Farm Primary School is for children to leave Y6 as confident, fluent readers who read for enjoyment and to further their knowledge and understanding of the world. Our intention is for children to have read a wide variety of rich, high-quality texts ranging from: graphic novels, classic texts and magazines to comics, poems and modern stories. 

It is our intention at RFPS that reading is placed at the heart of everything we do. We intend that reading will not only strengthen the core knowledge rooted within our writing and broader curriculum but will also play an important role in educating the whole child emotionally, culturally, socially and spiritually. 

We intend for our reading journey to be ambitious and progressive, so that learners are immersed and build experience of a wide range of diverse and carefully selected literature. We value the diverse cultures and beliefs of our school community, and the texts, which are available in our school and class libraries reflect this. 

Our intention is that all children experience a progressive, ambitious reading curriculum where skills are embedded over time and build on previous learning. We aim to improve children’s receptive and expressive language through expanding vocabulary, deepening comprehension, sharpening authorial technique, and nurturing a love of stories and a thirst for knowledge. 

We aim for children to be able to: 

• become quickly immersed in the Early Reading skills on entry to school, which continues throughout KS1 and beyond where relevant.
• articulate ideas, develop understanding and engage with others through spoken language.
• read easily, fluently and with good understanding.
• 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 reading to influence their writing write clearly, accurately, and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences.

The above aims are based on the NPAT key components for reading seen below:

Reading starts on the first day when children join Rectory Farm Primary School. 

We have designed our reading curriculum around the two core strands as outlined in the Scarborough Reading Rope: Word Recognition and Language Comprehension in order to teach our children to read.  

Word Recognition and Early Reading 

To develop children’s ability to recognise and decode words we use the Little Wandle Revised Letters and Sounds Programme as our implementation strategy. 

Children in EYFS and KS1 receive a daily 30-minute phonics lesson as well as a minimum of 2 small group reading sessions using a decodable text. The lowest 20% are monitored and carefully assessed with timely and appropriate interventions being put in place such as pre-teaching. They are also heard read more frequently. 

Any child who needs additional practice receives daily keep-up support from a trained adult. Keep-up lessons match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures, resources, and mantras, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every child secures their learning. 

Y3 children, who are not fully fluent readers or have not passed the phonics screening check, also receive a daily phonic lesson. 

Every child has access to a phonetically decodable book which is suitable for their reading attainment as well as a reading for pleasure book. These books are routinely monitored by the class teacher. 

Additionally, the purpose of these books is to introduce our readers to chapter books, where they can read and meet real authors, so that their love of reading grows. These books are designed as a step towards developing a love and independence of reading.

Our stage books draw from a range of schemes and publishers. This is to promote choice and variety within our children’s reading diets.  

Eventually, as children become more proficient at reading, their need for the decodable books will lessen until they are only reading the stage books. The table below shows the expected stage books to be read by the end of each year at RFPS: 

Reading Comprehension

 The explicit teaching of reading happens daily where children are taught specific reading skills, which enable them to become fluent readers. The key skills are taught according to a progression across school as shown below: 

Comprehension skills are embedded over time and build on previous learning. These skills support children in understanding the text more deeply. Our approach to teaching reading builds up over the course of the week, starting with children being supported by the teacher and moves towards the children applying the skills they have learned in a weekly comprehensive task each Friday. 

Our children are exposed to engaging texts that help to support learning in lesson. The quality of the text is pivotal to the success of the reading sequence and there is an expectation that is it ambitious, rich, and effectively assessed for its teaching potential

As children move into Key Stage 2, increased emphasis is placed on modelling written responses and children will become more familiar with the test-type questions through the teacher’s carefully selected use of sentence stems.

We use Herts 4 learning as a strategy to work with any children that need ‘catch-up’ interventions with their comprehension. This focuses on the way in which we use prosody when we read. The children will experience lots of practise of reading aloud alongside the adult and on their own.  

Daily ‘Love of Reading’ sessions enable learners to share a book of interest with an adult or peer, selecting from recommended reads, high-quality non-fiction books, poems, newspapers and comics. 

During the school day, the children have time to change their stage book; additional times are available for those enthusiastic readers and devourers of books. We are fortunate to have a school librarian, who supports the children with their reading choices and each class has a time to visit the library and learn how to access the reading material.