Reading

Reading 2024-2025

At Macaulay Primary Academy, we believe that every pupil has the ability to learn to read and that they have a fundamental right to access high-quality literature from their very first day of school. In order to achieve this, we teach, develop and promote reading across the academy in a number of different ways: Reading for Practice, Reading for Purpose and Reading for Pleasure.  By doing this, we strive to ensure that our pupils leave our academy, ready for the next phase of their education as fluent readers who have a love of reading.

Our Intent

Our academy aims to:

  • ensure that reading is prioritised;
  • equip all pupils with the necessary phonic knowledge and skills to allow them to access texts, at an age-appropriate level;
  • develop fluency at all stages so that our pupils learn to read text with proficient accuracy, automaticity and prosody;
  • encourage pupils to foster a love and appreciation of books across the school and beyond;
  • ensure that ALL children across the academy have access to challenging, quality, age-appropriate texts;
  • ensure that ALL children are being exposed to rich and varied vocabulary in order to address the word gap;  
  • provide a consistent approach in the teaching of reading comprehension;
  • encourage our pupils to respond to their reading in numerous ways;  
  • provide a clear structure for teacher’s delivery of reading which ensures full curriculum coverage and a progression across all Key Stages.

Implementation

Phonics and Early Reading

Phonics is taught in accordance with ELS across the Early Years Foundation Stage, Key Stage One and Key Stage Two where appropriate. Our aim is to develop the children’s phonological awareness, ability to segment and blend words and to read harder to read and spell by sight. For further detailed information of the progression, delivery and assessment of our phonics programme, please see our ‘Phonics and Early Reading Policy’.

Reading Books and Reading at Home

At Macaulay Primary Academy, we start our pupils’ reading journey by providing every child that starts in Nursery with a book bag package that includes: a book of nursery rhymes, a traditional story and a guide for supporting phonemic awareness and reading for pleasure at home.

As children begin to learn sounds more formally in F2, they take home a reading book that is well-matched to their current phonics knowledge. This allows them to ‘show off’ their new reading skills to their parents and carers at home.  Pupils also select a book for themselves which an adult at home may read to them. These books may be taken from the ‘Top 30 books’ series for each year group which are within every classroom reading corner.

As children master phonics, and their reading becomes more automatic, pupils will then take a book from our ‘Bridging scheme’. This scheme builds on the decodable books with which children are familiar and allows them to build up their confidence and fluency in reading a broader range of texts. These books for ‘practice’ have been carefully selected by the pupils’ class teacher so that it is not too easy, not too hard, but just right. Their ‘Goldilocks’ book. Pupils will still continue to be able to select books of their own choosing to promote a love and enjoyment of reading. As children grow in confidence and stamina, this book that they choose will be their daily reading book.

We promote and celebrate those pupils who read at home through our home reading challenge.  Pupils are rewarded each time they read at home and bring their reading record in. Rewards are in line with the school behaviour policy and children will earn house points which can be converted to spend at the Macaulay Prize Shop.

We endeavour to develop supportive relationships with our parents and carers from the start of school. We offer regular events in school which they are invited to attend. These events seek to provide parents and carers with information about how they can support their child’s reading at home.

If there is a concern around a pupil who is not reading at home, the class teacher will seek to contact their parent and offer support as required.

The Reading Strategy- ‘Reading for Practice’

The Reading Strategy is a trust-wide approach to develop reading comprehension and reading for meaning skills and strategies. It takes place EVERY day.  It incorporates age-appropriate, challenging texts, which are rich in vocabulary. Each week, there should typically be three lessons focussing on the core text. The other days will be given over to linked texts which will include poetry, non-fiction and other fiction texts to increase the breadth of genres and text-types that our pupils are exposed to.

Our Core texts are:

The Core principles of the Reading Strategy are as follows:

  • A daily whole class text reading session – approximately 45-50 mins in Key Stage Two, 30 minutes in Year 2 and 20 – 30 minutes in Year 1 (building up throughout the year towards the Summer Term);
  • Core texts will generally last for one full term (this may be a half-term in KS1) and linked texts for non-fiction, poetry, play scripts and other fiction extracts are taught alongside this;
  • All pupils are included in this lesson and are exposed to high-quality texts and discussions, despite potential barriers to their word reading and comprehension;
  • Teachers will identify children who are not yet on track to meet ARE for their year group and will plan activities during the independent task to develop their decoding and fluency as necessary. These pupils will also receive support in addition to this session to help them to catch up quickly;
  • All year groups have a reading response book. There should be at least 3 response recorded per week. These may be independent, guided, formal or informal responses to reading. These books should reflect the pride and importance of reading. Pupils in Year 1 will build up to this expectation across the year.
  • All reading sessions should have a clear learning objective in the form of a key question linked to the author’s impact on the reader so that pupils understand not only the reading skills or strategies that they are practising but also the impact an author has on us as a reader. The children’s written responses should reflect this key question.
  • Reading fluency plays an integral part in our Reading Strategy lessons.  Pupils will hear a fluent adult model of reading on a daily basis and be given the opportunity to read aloud each lesson using a range of fluency techniques;
  • Oracy is a key driver in reading sessions and is used to support children in forming well-developed answers and opinions around reading through rich discussion about the text.

Teaching Sequence

The teaching sequence of a book will be carefully mapped out across a term, or half-term where appropriate, to ensure that the core strategy texts are taught fully and in depth.  Linked texts (non-fiction, poetry and other fiction extracts) will be strategically placed within this teaching sequence to reinforce and revisit learning as well as providing new knowledge to support pupils in making inferences about their reading.

Structure of a Reading Session:

Reading lessons may vary in their structure depending on the sections of texts studied. Some sessions may be more generalised with extended periods of reading and discussion. Some sessions will be a fluency focus or the outcome may be a performance. However, the vast majority of sessions will follow this format with clear links to our Zones of Learning:

  1. RED ZONE – CONNECT – Quick-Fire Retrieval (may include activating background knowledge from other subjects)
  2. YELLOW ZONE – NEW LEARNING – Greenhouse Words (new / tricky vocabulary – may include providing new knowledge))
  3. YELLOW ZONE / GREEN ZONE – NEW LEARNING / I DO, YOU DO, WE DO – Read 3 Ways (I Read, We Read, You Read)
  4. GREEN ZONE – I DO – Modelling of focus skill/ strategy by the teacher (I do)
  5. GREEN ZONE – WE DO – Guided Practice with a partner or as a group (we do)
  6. PURPLE ZONE – YOU DO – Independent/ group response (You do)
  7. PURPLE ZONE – YOU DO – Challenge (opportunities to extend thinking / apply knowledge / make comparisons / make links between books and characters)

Supporting the needs of all readers (Raising and Lowering Cognitive Demand):

  • All children should be included in the Whole Class Reading session wherever possible. The reading session is a communal activity that brings the class together in a shared experience. It ensures that all readers have access to an age-appropriate book, ensuring that the vocabulary gap does not widen exponentially. However, it is important to us that pupils’ gaps in reading are addressed primarily through quality-first teaching in the classroom.
  • For the least fluent children who struggle to access the text independently they should, at times through the week, be given independent work which reflects what they have been covering in their phonic sessions during the independent part of the Whole Class Reading session to give them opportunity to apply/consolidate skills acquired. Phonics activities, should follow the strategies and resources from ELS.
  • Wherever possible, tasks should be adapted to enable pupils to access the same tasks as their peers and achieve the learning objective through these carefully planned adaptations.  Some examples of how this can be achieved are the highlighting of key paragraphs to help guide children to where they can locate evidence for an answer to a question or snipping smaller sections of the text to lower the cognitive demand of the task.
  • All pupils should be given opportunity to be exposed to more challenging questions and tasks either through increasing the cognitive demand of a question, task or activity or being encouraged to make links and comparisons across the books they have read in the form of a ‘challenge’ task.

Reading opportunities across the curriculum (Reading for Purpose)

As well as during their reading sessions, children will be given the opportunity to read and to apply the comprehension skills and strategies that they have practised across the wider curriculum.  This should happen daily with pupils drawing inferences from historical documents in history, to reading and following instructions in PE. This is carefully planned and sequenced as part of our REC (See Reading Enhanced Curriculum Policy).

Developing a reading culture (Reading for Pleasure)

At Macaulay Primary Academy, we strive to instil a love of books and reading to all of our pupils so that they excel not only in school but are equipped with a life-long love of reading.

We have many ongoing initiatives throughout the school such as:

  • A Timetabled daily story time for all classes
  • Reading corners within EY and KS1 classrooms that provide a range of high-quality, age-appropriate books for pupils to take home and either read for themselves, or for a parent to share with them.
  • Top 30 Reads series including narrative, non-fiction and books which reflect different realities. We also have a range of ‘This is me books’ which allow all children to see themselves reflected in a book or a character. These books are interwoven into a class story times to ensure all children read a range of diverse books from a range of diverse authors.
  • Our whole school is a library with each class having a themed bookshelf outside. Children can choose a book to take home for pleasure from around the school. This could be for them to read, for an adult to read to them or for them to read to a younger sibling.
  • Reading Ambassadors to promote a love of reading and recommend books around the academy.
  • Whole school author visits to bring reading to life.
  • Reading assemblies with teachers sharing their favourite book.
  • All children in our nursery receive a book through the post funded by the school and the Rotary C