Reading

What’s in a book?  A journey, experiences, laughter, tears, knowledge, curiosity, predictions, ideas!

At St.Barnabas we love to read; we believe passionately about the development of this skill. It’s integral to our curriculum as a tool for research and the acquisition of knowledge, for enjoyment and to improve our experiences to help us empathise and it enables us to access learning across a range of subjects.

We have invested in our reading practices and developed strategies for supporting our learners to excel within this subject, we do this by:

Sharing high quality books.

• Talking lots about how and why authors have chosen particular styles, devices and vocabulary to support the reader to understand the book. We call this strategy ‘Writer and Book Talk’ and it is used throughout units of English work.
• Assessing the children’s understanding in different ways: Benchmarking, phonic tests, comprehension tests. This information is used to plan lessons to meet the needs of the learners.
• Our reading lessons are called ‘Guided Reading’, where teachers read with a small group of learners. During this time they ask the learners a range of skills based questions to elicit their understanding of what they have read.
• Once our children are assessed, as soon at they start school, they begin their reading journey on the Reading Spine. The Reading Spine is not a scheme – it’s a selection of real books from a range of different schemes, authors and book packs which are colour banded together to ensure your child has a wide range of books to choose from.