Reading for Pleasure
At St Thomas More CVA, we aim to foster a love of reading in all children.
The children are read aloud to regularly throughout the week in class. The ‘Reading for Pleasure’ books shared with the children are planned out at the beginning of the year ensuring a range of books including fiction, non fiction and poetry.
Reading is celebrated at St Thomas More CVA and during the year each class will nominate a ‘Reader of the Week’.
In KS2 each class runs a weekly Book Club which gives children a chance to discuss their reading at home in a social and reflective way. Children are encouraged to think about what they enjoy reading and listen to recommendations from peers to encourage them to become active, independent readers.
Reading Comprehension
Through our reading comprehension curriculum children get the opportunity to experience a wide variety of texts, text types, authors, characters, settings and situations. They are encouraged to link what they read in texts to their wider understanding and learning and ask questions about what they read in texts to check their understanding.
In line with the National Curriculum, children Key Stage 2 will be taught to:
- Develop positive attitudes to reading, and an understanding of what they read, by listening to, reading and discussing a wide range of fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction and reference books or textbooks that are structured in different ways They will summarise important information from these texts both written and orally, consider and discuss the deeper meaning of texts and think about the language and layout of the writing and how the author has written for purpose and audience.
- They will have the opportunity to read and perform texts, poems and plays with partners, in groups or as a class and demonstrate their understanding of texts and characters through their expression and intonation.
- Children will be taught how to demonstrate their understanding of texts through retrieving information from the text to answer questions, justify their answers with references to the text, and how to draw inferences from the text using evidence from the text.
There are 3x 30-minute reading comprehensions scheduled in class every week, alongside the daily teacher read and weekly Book Club session.
Lesson 1 focuses on understanding the text. Children are introduced to and practice new and tricky vocabulary they will be exposed to in the text as well as learning about important contextual information they will need in order to properly understand he text. The extract is then read to them by the teacher to allow the children to experience what good intonation and prosody sounds like for the text. Children will then consider what the important pieces of information from the text are, whether as a class, in pairs/groups or individually, and then use this information to summarise the text.
Lesson 2 focuses on the children exploring the deeper meaning of the text. They will start the lesson by recapping the vocabulary they have learned from this extract and the contextual information required to understand the text before taking part in a shared read of the text involving both the teacher and the children reading the text to encourage intonation and prosody. After this, children will explore the information they can find out from the text about character, setting, atmosphere and purpose, audience, language and layout. They will use this information to make inferences about the text, author’s intentions and characters.
Lesson 3 focuses on the children independently demonstrating their understanding of a text. The lesson starts with the recap of vocabulary and context before the children are given time to read the text independently and use information from the text to answer a range of questions and question types with teachers demonstrating how questions should be answered.
Independent Reading
Children will have individual reading books sent home to be read and shared with parents on a regular basis. These books are matched to the child’s reading ability allowing them to improve their fluency at accuracy.
Children will have their reading level benchmarked regularly to ensure they have banded books that provide appropriate challenge. Once children have been assessed as reading and understanding texts at a level above that of the reading schemes followed in school then they will become a ‘Free Reader’ allowing them to select books themselves from the vast range we have in our class libraries.
All children have the opportunity to regularly access our school library and borrow books that they choose.
Supporting with reading at home
Research has shown that reading for pleasure can make a huge difference to children – not only academically (even in subjects like maths) but also socially and emotionally. Just ten minutes shared reading a day can help your child grow into a happy, confident learner.
Even if your child is a confident, independent reader it is still very beneficial for your child to also hear you reading aloud to them so please do share books together even as they get older.
In addition to hearing your child read aloud, here are some suggested questions you could ask to support their understanding:
“What has just happened?”
“Why do you think the character did that?”
“How do you think the character is feeling? Why do you think that?”
“What do you think is going to happen next?”
“What does this word mean?”/ “Can you find a word on the page that means….?”
“Do you like this book? Why/Why not?”
“What would you have done in this situation?”