At Shiphay Learning Academy, we believe that the ability to read fluently provides a gateway to lifelong learning and is vital for a pupil's future success. Success in reading has a direct effect on progress and is crucial in developing children's self-esteem, confidence and motivation. Reading also offers important emotional benefits, enabling pupils to talk about their ideas and feelings and lose themselves in books through listening to and talking about stories.

Prioritising reading from the start of a child's school journey, we aim to give all children the opportunity to become fluent, confident readers who can successfully comprehend and understand a wide range of texts. We want pupils to foster a genuine love of reading, have a good knowledge of a range of authors, and be able to understand more about the world in which they live through the knowledge they gain from texts.

By the end of their time at primary school, all children should be able to read proficiently and confidently across the curriculum. We understand the importance of parents and carers in supporting their children to develop both word reading and comprehension skills. So we want to encourage a home-school partnership that enables parents and carers to understand how to enhance the skills taught in school through high-quality texts using our reading prompts.

At Shiphay, we have designed a whole school reading curriculum:

• To support pupils in developing fluent reading capabilities;
• To teach reading comprehension strategies through modelling and supported practice;
• To develop pupils' language capability to support their reading and writing;
• To develop a genuine love of reading for pleasure
   

Based on the Simple View of Reading (1986) and the Scarborough's Reading Rope (2001), where reading has two dimensions: word recognition and language comprehension, our approach to reading is rooted in a strong systematic phonics curriculum from the start and a consistent approach to teaching reading comprehension and reading fluency. We have established timetabled, everyday reading practices in school, ensuring consistent, school-wide prioritisation of reading.

We explicitly teach pupils to read by modelling fluent reading, teaching word reading and reading comprehension strategies and maximising opportunities for adults to read with and to pupils, and for pupils to read both aloud and quietly, as well as engage in paired and shared reading. As well as frequent opportunities for independent reading, regular exposure to teacher-read high-quality texts that are above instructional level can support pupils' reading comprehension by extending their vocabulary development, especially when read with prosody.

We are committed to the promotion of reading for pleasure, building a reading culture that puts reading and text discussions at the heart of the school day and promotes reading for pleasure and the reading of challenging texts at school and home.

The whole school reading curriculum is delivered through the following approaches.

• Synthetics Phonics
• Shared and Guided Reading
• Independent Reading in school and at home
• Hearing quality text read aloud
• Daily Story Time from a rich and diverse reading spine
• Fluency
• Targeted Intervention for the Bottom 20%:
• Vocabulary
• Reading for Pleasure

For further information regarding the schemes we use, please click on the links below.