Reading

Curriculum Intent

At Perrymount, we aim to raise the achievements, and therefore life chances, of all our children by putting quality teaching of reading at the heart of all learning. We recognise that high quality, effective teaching of reading is essential for children to access and gain knowledge across the whole of the National Curriculum and therefore to achieve educational success.  

Our school is committed to fostering a life-long love of reading in all our children, as we understand that a crucial aspect of a child’s success in reading is reading for pleasure and purpose.  We are dedicated to ensuring that by teachers and children exploring and learning about texts collaboratively, all children are enabled to become independent readers with a deep understanding, appreciation and love of different texts.

We believe our children should be exposed to and engage with a broad range of ambitious, language rich, memorable texts in reading lessons and across curriculum subjects with the aim to improve children’s awareness of themselves, make sense of the world in which they live, feed their imagination and curiosity, and to acquire new vocabulary. The reading journeys of our children are closely linked with shaping a sense of self, developing empathy and broadening outlooks, so it is essential that the children at Perrymount experience characters and stories that reflect their lives, cultures and backgrounds.  

Curriculum Implementation

Reading is taught daily from EYFS to Year 6.

In EYFS and KS1, children experience a robust, systematic teaching of phonics using the Read, Write, Inc (RWI) programme, designed to ensure progress for every child. Children learn simple grapheme phoneme correspondence, to accurately blend sounds, to decode simple words and to read the accompanying RWI books. Within these structured RWI lesson, children read levelled, coloured books that correspond to their increasing knowledge and reading skills. Due to the progressive structure of the scheme, and as they move through these coloured texts, children gain confidence as early readers. Children who find it difficult to make progress at the same rate as their peers are given additional one-to-one support to catch up.We feel it is the energy, enthusiasm and passion that teachers put into these RWI lessons that bring the teaching and learning to life.

In addition to RWI daily phonics lessons, high-quality texts act as a stimulus for our KS1 writing units. By engaging with books at every opportunity, we are building the children’s motivation to read for pleasure and increasing the breadth of our reading provision.

Once children have graduated from the RWI programme, usually in the latter end of year 2, teachers begin a ‘soft’ approach of the KS2 approach to reading designed to act as a bridge between the two.

In KS2, teachers use the Destination Reader approach for daily whole-class reading sessions, which include modelling, discussion of texts and independent reading. This approach uses well-proven reading strategies known to deepen comprehension of high-quality texts and specific learning behaviours that support children to know how to communicate and make talk central to reading lessons. Talk is a crucial element of Destination Reader lessons so children are active learners. Our children all have the opportunity to think, explain, internalise their learning, clarify and build on others ideas which ensures children learn at a deeper level and are challenged by different viewpoints.  The explicit teaching of vocabulary is built into these lessons. In addition to the whole class reading sessions, children have regular opportunities to read at their own instructional level to ensure that every child is able to access and enjoy reading. Children experience a broad range of genres, fiction, non-fiction and poetry to ensure breadth of reading that is built on as children move through KS2.

As well as the explicit teaching of reading, children at Perrymount come together as a class to experience regular shared story time sessions. These allow children to get lost in a text without interruption, hear a skilled reader bring a text to life, and be exposed to language and vocabulary. Our book corners are stimulating, well-organised and encourage children to read by displaying a different focus author each term. In order to ensure that children are reading a range of high-quality texts and a range of genres at the correct level, we have a home-reading system which teachers monitor.

Writing

Curriculum Intent

It is our aim that all children who attend Perrymount leave us as coherent, confident, imaginative communicators, who are well-equipped with the skills they need to adapt their written language and style to a range of contexts, purposes and audiences – skills that will stay with them for life and impact positively on their life achievements and opportunities.

It is our key intention that children at Perrymount see themselves as writers from their first day in school. We want children to be inspired and motivated to write and to develop a genuine love of language and the written word. It is essential that children understand that writing is a process driven by the reader and that they write for a purpose that is relevant and meaningful. We are committed to cultivating a wide-ranging vocabulary in our pupils to give them the tools they need to express their thoughts, ideas and knowledge effectively.  We want to build their confidence and independence to successfully evaluate the effectiveness of their own writing and to edit accordingly. Ultimately, we want all the children of our school to feel pride in their written work.

Curriculum Implementation

When planning writing, teachers follow our writing curriculum (based on the National Curriculum). Our units of writing are planned around quality texts that inspire, motivate, and demonstrate how a writer fulfils a purpose and creates a desired impact on his/ her audience. We have a flexible approach to choosing texts to teach writing as there are always new and exciting books published every year and we strongly believe in allowing for both children and teacher preferences.

At Perrymount, we focus on the four purposes for writing when planning our writing units: writing to entertain, writing to inform, writing to persuade and writing to discuss.

Years 1 and 2	Years 3 and 4	Years 5 and 6
Writing to entertain Writing to inform	Writing to entertain Writing to inform Writing to persuade	Writing to entertain Writing to inform Writing to persuade Writing to discuss

Half of the curriculum focuses on writing to entertain and KS1 ensure that narratives is included every half term. Each of these purposes for writing is revisited that academic year in order to strengthen and build on existing knowledge and skills.

From Reception to Year 6, the Talk for Writing framework is used to move the children from imitation to innovation to independent application. This three-stage approach enables children to orally imitate and internalise language they need, before moving on to reading and analysing features of a model text. Teachers then use shared and guided writing to grow independence and to grow children into creative and effective writers. When they come to write their own version, children are guided through planning, drafting and revising their work independently. Children are set individual targets to improve the quality of their writing, which reflect the individual challenges they face and enable all children to make progress.

In addition to our writing units inspired by quality texts, teachers may also provide a stimulus such as a film clip, interesting object, drama, wordless picture book, work of art, or music as a starting point for short burst writing activities.

Whilst grammar, spelling and handwriting are taught within our writing lessons, they are each taught discretely using bought-in schemes of work.