Reading

Intent
At Lowton Junior and Infant School, we believe the teaching of reading is integral to a child’s understanding and appreciation of the world around them; a platform that allows our children to see beyond what they know, overcome barriers, share in cultural experiences, and develop the vocabulary they need to effectively express themselves. We are aware of the impact reading has on the cognitive, social, and linguistic development of children in addition to the children’s well-being and future academic success later in life. We aspire for every child to leave Year 6 as a fluent, confident reader with a thirst and true love for reading irrespective of their starting points, background, gender, needs or ability.

We strive to offer higher levels of support or extra challenge for those who need it so that all pupils can access learning during daily lessons. We aim to inspire an appreciation of our rich and varied literary heritage and foster a habit of reading widely and often, both for information and for enjoyment. It is our shared staff vision that children develop an intrinsic motivation to read for pleasure and leave our school having cultivated a life-long love of books and discuss books with excitement and interest.

At Lowton Junior and Infant School, we believe that regular reading at home is an important tool in developing reading skills. We understand the significance of parents and carers in supporting their children to develop both word reading and comprehension skills, so endeavour to build a home-school partnership which enables parents and carers to have the confidence to support their children with reading at home.

The teaching of reading across the school consists of two strands: word reading and comprehension.

Our aspiration for all readers:
• be secure in their phonic knowledge during early reading and develop strategies to independently decode unfamiliar words
• develop accuracy and automaticity when reading
• develop the comprehension skills of retrieval, inference, summarising, inference, prediction and making comparisons across a range of texts and genres
• actively engage as a reader through contributing to ‘book talk’
• adjust their approach to ensure understanding, e.g. re-reading sections if meaning is lost and using their knowledge of etymology and morphology to unravel the meanings of words
• read for pleasure and information across a wide range of fiction and non-fiction
• use reading to support their acquisition of knowledge and vocabulary across all subjects.

Curriculum overview

Progression of skill 

Years 3 and 4 reading domains

Years 5 and 6 reading domains

Questioning and learning opportunities