Reading Intent

Eastchurch Church of England Primary School is a nurturing, inclusive, learning community that celebrates all possibilities. Learning to read and acquiring purposeful and relevant English knowledge, skills and understanding are fundamental in enabling our community to flourish in their everyday life. It is essential that our approach to teaching phonics and reading is accessible to all learners, regardless of background.

We have created a reading curriculum that is aspirational and committed to providing all our pupils with the knowledge and skills needed to thrive and succeed. We strive to enable all to grow as resilient, life-long readers so that our children can flourish and achieve their full potential.

To do this we deliver reading lessons that are imaginative, stimulating and thoughtfully planned. The priority for all our pupils is to develop the skills necessary to be successful throughout their educational career and beyond. The teaching of reading and talking is at the heart of our school and we ensure teachers have the knowledge and determination to teach every child to read, regardless of age, background or need. We place literature as the central pillar in establishing all children’s identities. 
 

Reading is a great habit. Like all habits, it needs repetition and regularity to establish itself. Because it needs quiet time, and our lives today are very short of this, we need to create it for our children. This means consciously making time and keeping interruptions to a minimum. The earlier we can start, the better as it allows the maximum time for children to grow up with reading and for the love to take root, grow and become part of their life.

And what an enriched life that will be.
 

Our Reading Curriculum
 

Every teacher in our school has been trained to teach reading, so we have the same expectations of progress. We all use the same language, routines and resources to teach children to read so that we lower children’s cognitive load. This also ensures consistency and pace of progress.
 

• Weekly content grids map each element of new learning to each day, week and term for the duration of the programme.
• Lesson templates, prompt cards and ‘How to’ videos ensure teachers all have a consistent approach and structure for each lesson.
• Our Reading Leaders and SLT use checklists and templates to regularly monitor and observe teaching; they use the summative data to identify children who need additional support and have gaps in learning.

We understand the need for reading to be the heart of our curriculum; teaching all our children to read is our leading priority. To ensure all our pupils achieve, our school teaches other reading lessons alongside Little Wandle Phonics lessons and Reading Practice sessions.