Reading For Pleasure

We promote a love of reading to ensure that children develop the knowledge and skills to become life–long readers. We believe this is key for children to access other areas of the curriculum with success. Our ‘Reading for Pleasure’ Lead and the pupil Reading Ambassadors ensure that reading for pleasure has a high profile in school.

We also promote a love of reading by holding book themed days and events both as individual classes and across the whole school eg World Book Day, Masked Reader, which engages the children with reading. All children are encouraged to participate in the summer reading challenge as well as having events throughout the year. Children are introduced to a variety of literature. Book Fairs are held to allow all children the chance to look at new books of all genres and hopefully purchase a new book of their own to take home. Our well-stocked school library promotes authors and a range of reading material to appeal to all pupils. Children’s suggestions for new books are encouraged and purchased. We ensure that our books reflect our inclusive, diverse community.

In Key Stage 2, we have a home-school Reading for Pleasure scheme for children who have progressed from the reading bands. The objective of this scheme is to motivate children to read and enjoy high quality, classic children’s literature, to spark or enhance a lifelong love of reading, with all the benefits that that brings. The scheme is called Reading Explorers, to show that through reading, we can explore the past, present and future; the place we live, other places, outer space and imaginary worlds; and lives like our own and very different lives.

We have a ‘book-based’ approach to our English Curriculum. High quality, challenging, whole-class texts are used to teach the majority of the English objectives and allow children to immerse themselves in the book. The book then provides a purposeful context for high quality writing opportunities.  We encourage children to have pride in their writing across all areas of the curriculum and produce work to a high standard.

Every class has a class text which is read to the children regularly in order to enhance their exposure to high quality texts. the well stocked and recently replenished school library offers children a range of high quality books and the children themselves replenish their class library from the main library at the start of each block. Children are able to choose their own book to read for pleasure, as well as accessing a progressive reading scheme to help them with reading at home. Children need the space and time to make choices about books, and to discover authors and texts they might not get chance to look at outside of school.