Reading

The English curriculum at Forge Wood Primary School enables children to become strong readers and writers who can confidently articulate and express themselves.  This is developed through the five strands of our curriculum: reading, writing, phonics, SPaG (spelling, punctuation and grammar), and oracy.

At Forge Wood Primary School, we firmly believe that reading opens the door to all learning.  Children develop a passion for reading to become lifelong learners, reading for pleasure both in school and at home.  Children have ample opportunities to read and select their own books alongside ones that are phonetically decodable at their level.  The library is enjoyed by all year groups throughout the day including lunchtime where children can enjoy a book cuddled up quietly in a cove or share books around a table with friends.  Older children choose to read to younger ones, passing on their love of reading.  These books can then be shared and enjoyed at home too.

High quality texts have been carefully chosen to develop children’s vocabulary through reading a range of different styles.  Forge Wood Primary School’s reading curriculum provides opportunities to read books of literary heritage as well as books that mirror their own lives and provide a window into other people’s worlds.  This ensures their reading journey celebrates their own identity, the diversity of our community as well as of the wider world.

The vital skills of decoding, fluency, prosody and understanding are modelled and explicitly taught and developed as they progress with their learning.  This is developed through our reading curriculum from Reception to Year 6 which is built upon the foundations of DERIC (Decode, Explain, Retrieve, Interpret and Choice). 

 

• In all year groups: children are exposed to high quality texts, which include Pie Corbett’s Spine books, which are read to them daily.
• In Reception and Year 1: children’s vocabulary grows, drawing on the best of children’s literature. Talk Through Stories helps children love stories and extends and deepens children’s comprehension and vocabulary.  It teaches them to use ‘Tier Two’ words from the story in everyday contexts.
• During Year 2: as a bridge to whole class reading, children develop their reading fluency and comprehension using Read Write Inc Comprehension. 
• From Year 2: children engage in daily ‘Whole Class Reading’ sessions.  These sessions are based around a high quality story book and extracts from a range of genres.  Each lesson will explicitly teach vocabulary looking at the skills of decoding, definitions, applying it correctly in context and connecting it with known and familiar language alongside synonyms and antonyms to create deep and rich connections between language.  The lessons will continue with explicit fluency instruction which develops conscious prosody (expressive reading).  This will include echo reading, paired reading, text marking (marking where stress/intonation, pauses etc happen), repeated reading, pre-reading and performance reading.  Comprehension will then follow with a focus which will include skills linked to: retrieve, infer, authorial intent, summarising, predicting and comparing.