Our Reading Vision
Reading at Cleadon Church of England Academy
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
Dr Seuss
Reading is one of life’s great pleasures and also maybe its greatest treasure. Inspiring a lifelong love of reading and books is maybe the greatest gift we can give our children. At Cleadon Church of England Academy, reading and books are at the heart of the curriculum as we believe that all of our children should be able to read for pleasure and to a high standard. We want to stimulate their imaginations to open up countless worlds of awe, wonder and joy. In order to do this, we aim to arm every child with the tools they will need to develop into an enthusiastic and confident readers, both at home and at school. Reading has the facility to improve so many aspects of our lives, including language, vocabulary, imagination, an understanding of people and places and above all, the key to unlocking an unending stream of knowledge.
At Cleadon, every child is taught a range of strategies to support their development to become a confident, independent reader. In Foundation and Key Stage 1, phonics through Essential Letters and Sounds is taught on a daily basis which enables children to segment and decode words. Once the children have learnt how to read, they can then learn to comprehend and understand the text they are reading. Texts are engaging, linked to their phonic knowledge and provide them with the opportunity to practise their phonic sounds. However, we understand that for some children, the challenge of texts that are not completely decodable is required to spark and maintain their interest and allow them to read for pleasure. Children are encouraged to use a range of strategies independently to understand, enjoy and learn from a range of texts. Through this, they will become fluent, expressive readers with the stamina to enjoy challenging texts.
In KS2, children are provided with the opportunity to apply their reading and comprehension skills to a variety of texts. Book discussion is widely encouraged in class, which supports children to empathise with characters, share opinions and debate topics.
Teachers nurture a love of books by placing reading at the centre of the curriculum, introducing new texts with enthusiasm and enjoyment, promoting a sense of wonder and expectation as the text is explored. All teachers use quality texts in all aspects of their teaching across the curriculum and provide opportunities that extend and enrich the children’s learning. It is these tools and opportunities that we believe give our children the necessary skills to become thoughtful and confident readers for life, which helps them in everything they do. The children at Cleadon have independent access to a wide variety of high quality texts in dedicated class reading areas as well as a range of library books.
We strongly believe that reading at home is an essential part of children becoming excellent readers and because of this, children have a wide range of banded fiction and non-fiction books, both digitally and in more traditional form, for home reading. This choice ensures children continue to be enthusiastic and independent readers. We offer books to reflect children’s individual interests and also books to reflect age-appropriate material – not always a match to reading age. Children are encouraged to read regularly at home from Foundation Stage to Year 6. We encourage parents to become involved in their child’s reading in a variety of ways, aiming to extend the children’s love of reading into the home. Children’s individual reading records are an important source of communication between home and school and parents and carers are strongly encouraged to sign the reading journals to indicate how often the child has read and how they approached a text. Parents are invited into school to hear readers, support small groups during reading and phonic activities, organise library sessions and read to children.
The profile of reading is deliberately kept high across the Academy. The ‘Extreme Reading Challenge’ is always popular, whole-school curricular themes often contain an additional reading challenge or competition, the Virtual Library is much enjoyed and our elected Reading Ambassadors promote a love of reading across the school.
