Our teaching of reading focuses on the key skills: decoding, fluency, predicting, inferring, summarising, clarifying and questioning. Children are encouraged to make links to previous knowledge and experiences to engage with stories and information. There is a strong focus on reading for pleasure and children are expected to be able to discuss favourite authors.

Adults read to the children every day- In EYFS/ KS1, it could be from a featured author of the term or based on special interests of the children or topic. Weekly opportunities for children to read independently are given to encourage reading for pleasure and build up their reading stamina with individual or paired reading time. 

RIC activities - allow for a short focus on retrieval, interpretation or choice evaluating skills. They can be taken from images, clips, extracts of class texts or modelled texts later used for writing activities to focus on genre features. 

Reading sessions occur daily in KS1: daily phonics, daily RIC activity and a reading session. All activities are focused on ensuring children make progress in reading, such as making inferences; reading for meaning by following instructions, ordering pictures or answering questions; developing phonic knowledge or clarifying words by matching definitions to images. Valuable evidence of reading will be kept in Reading folder rather than English books. Phonics will also be rehearsed in other contexts as part of our creative curriculum.  

During reading sessions, children will have the opportunity to read aloud, rehearse skills and records will be kept of their word recognition and language comprehension skills. Reading assessments will be recorded in the Reading Evidence file. Children will be regularly assessed against book band levels to ensure they are reading at 95% accuracy. In EYFS& KS1, readers will be heard at least twice a week (once in a reading session and one individual reading practice). 

Reading sessions work best when they are part of the overall English journey for the week- linked to the writing task or to their understanding of topic learning.