Reading

At Robert Miles, our aim is for all children to be skilled and confident readers with a love of reading. These aims are prioritised to enable access to our full curriculum and ensure a readiness for secondary school.

The starting point is ensuring our new Year 3 children are confident decoding and blending sounds. Where they are not, we have a specially trained member of staff who can support them in ensuring they rapidly move through the Phonics intervention programme.

The core component of our approach is the daily reading session which is built on four central pillars:

1. High quality texts, set out in our Book Spine and elsewhere, giving children access to range of genres and text types.

2. An explicit focus on Vocabulary designed to develop children’s lexicon

3. Reading aloud to develop children’s fluency to free up working memory

4. Comprehension techniques enable children to become confident at retrieving, inferring, summarising and sequencing

Children have access to other high quality texts elsewhere in our curriculum including, in particular, model texts in Talk for Writing where the same components are used to aid understanding.

Alongside this deliberate approach to teaching reading are daily intervention sessions, based on assessment data, for the children who need additional provision to support them in catching up.

The school library, class libraries, author visits and enrichment activities support developing children’s love of reading.