Reading is a central part of every pupil’s life at our school and is at the heart of our curriculum; every child in our school is a reader. From Reception we teach our pupils to read through the use of the Letters and Sounds phonics programme, which you can find out more about here. Our pupils in Reception and Year 1 receive daily dedicated phonics instruction, which follows the Read, Write Inc. scheme of work. When pupils complete our phonics programme, they move on to a focused spelling programme that will further enhance their reading ability.

Children in our school have regular reading lessons in the form of whole class guided reading. Throughout the week, pupils develop different reading skills which we refer to as VIPERS (Vocabulary, Infer, Predict, Explain, Retrieve and Summarise) and they also read independently to an adult in school regularly. All pupils take home reading books, matched to their individual reading ability, which we ask them to read to their parents or carers. Children in Year 2 and in Key Stage 2 take part in the Accelerated Reader programme, which involves them taking fun online quizzes when they have finished their books, to improve their reading comprehension. It is our expectation that pupils aim to read daily at home and should read at least five times a week. We use a reading incentive in school to encourage frequent reading. 

As well as developing confident readers, we also want our children to develop a love of reading. We use a programme of study called 'Read to Write', which uses high quality, engaging books at the heart of all of our English lessons.

Reading takes place in all of our curriculum subjects and lessons, highlighting the importance of reading for information, as well as reading for pleasure. Children in our school have positive attitudes to reading and talk with enthusiasm about it.

All children have story time at the end of the day, which is where the teacher reads to the class. All our Reading Spine books are carefully chosen; a list of which can be found on the English page linked below.

We have a beautiful whole school library called 'The Deep Dark Wood'. Children are encouraged to access the library throughout the week during lunchtimes and borrow books to take home.