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Intent
We recognise reading is a vital life skill and are passionate about instilling our love of books and literature in the children we teach. Our guiding principle is that children should leave Year 6 fluent, confident and enthusiastic readers having been immersed in a profusion of rich and engaging texts throughout their school life. Our reading curriculum will challenge children to become inspired thinkers, able to understand ideas, articulate emotions and make responses to debates using wide-ranging and precise vocabulary. Our children will have naturally enquiring minds stimulated by an understanding of the power of non-fiction and reference works, as well as a love of exploring and experiencing worlds both real and fantastical. We want our children to leave Year 6 equipped with the tools to take on the challenge of secondary education, but above all we want them to welcome books as friends that appeal to our interests, challenge us to question, and excite and entertain us.
Implementation
Our reading curriculum is aspirational. It is biased and shaped to meet the individual, contextual and holistic needs of all pupils. Formative assessment is used constructively to secure ambitious objectives, supporting learners to maximise their abilities.
Ranvilles’ reading curriculum recognises the journey every individual undertakes in becoming a fluent and independent reader. Every child is unique and the point they have reached on their journey is not necessarily determined by age or year group. As such, implementation begins with the Ranvilles Reading Pathways – a progression map that organises the National Curriculum into streams of development from Year 1 to Year 6. These separate reading domains into constituent skills, making age-related expectations clear to classroom teachers. The pathways are used to assess progression points and meet developmental needs, as well as challenging children to be successful.
Teachers know where every child in their care is on the pathway and can identify if interventions or additional support are required in line with the school’s ‘Five Step Plan for Learning Success’. This works in conjunction with our ‘Practise, Prove, Perfect’ (PPP) philosophy, through which children emerge from the nascent learning of a skill to gaining confidence in its use before finally showing masterful control.
To help children understand the diverse range of skills needed to be a Master Reader, we have developed characters for the eight reading domains, along with two additions that cover verbal communication. Our ‘Ranvilles Reading Masters’ adorn every classroom wall and offer a common language throughout reading work, meaning children become expert over the four years at recognising the difference between skills such as decoding, retrieval and inference and how and when we use them to interrogate a text. The Masters also go home with the children; parents are provided with a guide to their use so that time spent reading at home is purposeful and rewarding for both parent and child.
Assessment for Learning identifies children who will benefit from reading intervention. These children are supported by an adult to develop as phonetic readers while exploring meaning through the Reading Masters. Guided reading supports all children (at their ability level) to make focused and rapid progress.
Within the main English lesson, reading skills are taught discretely as well as being interwoven with writing so children have the chance to use what they are learning. Model texts provide a rich and varied stimulus for writing work and teachers are proficient in the art of reading texts metacognitively, encouraging children to participate in the thinking process behind understanding reading. A mixture of independent, whole class and small group comprehension work allows for variety in approach and facilitates multiple options for teacher assessment. Reading feeds into the half-termly Big Debate week, where children put their accumulated knowledge into action by debating a wide variety of motions. This means not only using language skills to communicate opinions and ideas, but also to consider the act of debating itself – listening to, responding to and building on others’ ideas to work co-operatively and collaboratively.
Reading naturally extends beyond the English lesson: whether examining sources in history, understanding beliefs and religions of the world in RE or evaluating ideas to put toward the Big Debate – reading is a core part of our foundation studies. We enrich this by using a wide variety of exciting and purposeful texts, ranging from model texts in lessons to the end-of-day class novel; a special time for sharing and enjoying a story as a class.
Impact
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Children at Ranvilles will be competent, expressive readers who understand the importance and benefit of the diverse range of texts we encounter in modern life. Whether that is through curling up with an indulgent novel, reading world news through a webpage, understanding the use of sound and image in a film or taking part in informed discussion about events impacting their lives, Ranvilles children will have a foundation for communicating with confidence. They will be considered thinkers, vocabulary rich speakers and articulate communicators who show high levels of engagement with texts and a voracious desire to explore the imagination and wonder of stories.
Above all, by accessing and exploring the world and its citizens through reading, they will have an empathy with others: an ability to see and accept points of view different to their own; appreciate lives and cultural backgrounds beyond their own; and through debate, give reasoned and informed opinions.