The Hill Primary Academy Astrea Academy Trust
We are a reading school!
All reading in school is driven by these Astrea Reading strategy expectations:
| 1. | School leaders ensure reading is at the centre of the curriculum. |
| 2. | All adults are teachers of reading. |
| 3. | All recognise that reading aloud is one of the most valuable activities an adult can do. |
| 4. | Pupils read a wide range of brilliant literature. |
| 5. | Early Reading. Rigorous, pure, systematic synthetic phonics programme is in place. Stories, rhymes, songs and poems are prioritised in the setting. |
| 6. | The school prioritises fluency. |
| 7. | The school fosters a word-rich culture. |
| 8. | The school has a systematic approach to supporting comprehension development. |
From the very moment that our pupils begin nursery, they are exposed to a wide variety of literature to inspire a love for reading that we hope the children will hold for life. Reading texts and talking about the books is something that begins in nursery but carries on throughout the whole school. Children read a range of texts, some just for pleasure, as a whole class. Some of these texts are chosen by the children themselves based on their knowledge of authors and the genres that they know that they enjoy.
We look to our parents for support when teaching reading, asking the children to read regularly at home and rewarding them for doing so. Our parents know that we expect our pupils to read widely and often and support us by listening to their children read regularly at home.
Our school library is used well by all children weekly. Reading ambassadors help to run the library and canvas ideas of texts to be added to the library from their peers and meetings with the school councilors who carry the voice of our pupils.
| When learning how to read, the children begin their journey by accessing RWI Phonics sessions. As children begin to read, we focus on decoding, primarily through phonics in addition to other strategies, e.g. whole word recognition, rhyme and context. Our children in Reception and KS1 are placed in homogenous groupings after careful assessments so that they are taught at the appropriate level to them. Children are taught new sounds in the speed sounds sessions and then consolidate their knowledge of learned sounds and comprehension skills within storytime. An extra pinny time session is taught every day in keys stage 1 and fast track tutoring is used to ensure that children keep up, not catch up.
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The Reading Curriculum recognises that learning to read once phonics knowledge is secure is not a linear process, and that when learners are approaching and unpicking a text they need to develop and draw on multiple skills. Thus, the Reading Curriculum adopts a Strand Curriculum model (as opposed to a spiral model), where multiple objectives are woven through each lesson. This enables pupils to convert inflexible knowledge into more flexible knowledge by applying skills repeatedly in different contexts. When children finish the RWI programme and we are confident that they can read fluently enough through careful fluency assessments, children then have access to age appropriate texts from the high-quality book areas within classrooms. These are set out in the same way as our school library with books organised by genre. These reading environments are tidy, well-respected and well-used areas of the classroom. These books are those that the children take home to read.
To further develop children’s reading abilities, the children are then taught reading sessions that follow the Astrea teaching sequence which is taken from the Astrea Strategy. As children build fluency, comprehension skills become our main area of focus and questioning looks at skills such as retelling, inference and prediction. We believe that high-quality literature is key to motivating children to read and instilling in children a love of literature and we have a carefully selected spine of books that teachers use.
The school ensures that vocabulary is studied and acquired along the learning journey, based on the work of Isobel Beck. Tier 2 vocabulary is practiced daily through a multitude of subjects and tier 3 vocabulary is acquired through the teaching of subject-specific lessons. Children practice using all of this vocabulary so that they can use it in their writing and to support them with oracy task such as debates and persuasive speeches as part of our inquiry led philosophy sessions.
English Writing
The Literary Curriculum is a complete, book-based approach to the teaching of primary English. Developed by The Literacy Tree, a group of English specialists who have all been teachers, school leaders and moderators, the Literary Curriculum immerses children in a literary world, creating strong levels of engagement to provide meaningful and authentic contexts for learning.
Children become critical readers and acquire an authorial style as they encounter a wide range of significant authors and a variety of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
Children read a range of texts, introduced to them in engaging ways to peak their enthusiasm. The units cover the national curriculum objectives for each year group. Each unit builds on the skills progressively so that the children are able to implement these skills into a final piece of writing. Objectives are repeated through the different units to ensure that learning and writing skills are committed to long-term memory.
Many of the texts link to other areas of the curriculum, such as Hidden Figures, read by our year 5 children supports their understanding when they cover the science unit Astronomy. Sometimes the texts act as inspiration to a unit that will be covered in another curriculum subject but sometimes the text is read afterward to help deepen the children’s understanding as they have much of the contextual knowledge on the subject.
High-quality displays of written work as showcases around the school. Our pupils have high expectations of themselves and are proud of their written outcomes.
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