English

Reading

At Saint Aidan’s we believe that giving our children the opportunity to read and write is giving them the tools to become life-longer learners. This will enable them to live an enriching and rewarding life. It is our hope for every child.

We believe the key to successful reading is to enjoy reading. We encourage all our children to love reading a wide variety of material including, books, comics magazines and on-line text.

We teach daily phonics lessons from Early Years to Year 2 and if it is needed in other year groups. Our children are assessed half termly to track their progress. Appropriate interventions are implemented to accelerate progress. We provide workshops for parents and send home information and activities to help their children at home, on a regular basis.

Reading is taught daily and children are taught to read in guided reading sessions with teachers and support staff. Children are also able to apply learned skills in a variety of activities. Children read in as many situations as possible. Reading takes place in all lessons using books and electronic devices.

We use a variety of reading scheme texts and non-scheme books to ensure our children learn and apply a range of reading strategies. We strive to provide books/text that engage all our children and their interests.

We follow the ‘Read to Write’ scheme which is designed to provide high quality text, with learning opportunities to inspire and aid our children to produce a quality piece of writing.

We have also started to use an exciting new Reading scheme this year called ‘Steps to Read.’ This is designed to provide high quality text, with learning opportunities for children to appreciate text at a level normally beyond their reading ability. Children have loved the fiction and non-fiction books, met exciting new vocabulary and increased their comprehension skills. We are very excited to further embed this scheme in the next academic year.

Reading for Pleasure

At Saint Aidan’s Catholic Primary School we recognise the importance of our children enjoying reading. With this in mind we have a number of events throughout the year which help us place emphasis on reading for pleasure and broadening our children’s experience of reading and books.

Reading Ambassadors

Meet our new Reading Ambassadors for this year. Our job is to meet regularly to come up with ideas to keep reading for pleasure interesting in our school. We have just put together a lovely Autumn display of non-fiction and fiction themed books and we have fed back to our classes to take some time out to visit the library and enjoy the Autumn books. We will change our library theme throughout the year and feed back to our classes about other reading ideas during the school year.