Kaizen Primary School

Intent

Children at Kaizen often start their reading journey here; many of our children are from disadvantaged families that do not have books at home and begin their school life coming from vocabulary-poor environments. Kaizen has a high mobility rate (23% for 2021-22, nearly ¼ of our whole school cohort were new last year). As a school, we recognise that reading is an essential skill for life and we want all children to learn to read as quickly as possible so that they can read to learn. We intend to develop a life-long love and habit of reading for all of our learners. English has a pre-eminent place in education and society and a high-quality reading education will ensure the development of fluency in other areas of English; speaking, listening and writing. This is especially important due to the needs of our children at Kaizen, many of whom have limited pre-school reading experience, a lack of reading culture at home and poor spoken language skills. At Kaizen, we want to empower our children, through reading, to become confident communicators and to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. Frequent exposure to and exploration of high-quality children’s literature is a vital part of this development. Reading is also an important tool for enabling children to acquire knowledge of the wider world  and build on what they already know from first hand experiences.

Reading truly underpins accessibility to all other learning. Through our Reading Curriculum, we aim to promote high standards of literacy and language by equipping children with a strong command of the English language, thus empowering them to access and enjoy the full curriculum offer. We aim to demonstrate the significance of learning to read through showcasing the future career opportunities available as part of our ‘Future Me’ initiative. 

Reading for pleasure will be a habit and a passion for all children and therefore reading needs to be built into all that we do at school in order to build secure relationships with reading that last a lifetime. 

The English curriculum ensures that by the time our children leave in Year 6, they will be able to:

• read most words effortlessly and pronounce unfamiliar written words with increasing automaticity.
• apply their growing knowledge of root words, prefixes and suffixes to read aloud and to understand the meaning of new words they are faced with. 
• explain and discuss their understanding of what they have read, drawing inferences and justifying these with evidence
• predict, summarise, evaluate and make comparisons based on what they have read. 
• retrieve information from non-fiction texts. 
• read a range of texts that are structured in different ways, for different purposes.

Vocabulary development is a key aspect of our whole school curriculum as a result of the high proportion of children who start Kaizen Primary School with lower levels of vocabulary than is typical for their age. 

Vocabulary is taught explicitly to support the development of reading comprehension from nursery to year 6. 

The English curriculum starts when the children begin their learning journey in the Early Years.  Alongside our systematic, synthetic phonics programme we invite and encourage our children to explore reading and teach them to behave as a reader through the ‘communication, language and literacy’ strand of the EYFS curriculum. Children are taught to engage in, pay attention to and focus on longer stories, listen to and discuss stories by answering ‘why’ questions, sing a repertoire of songs and develop a repertoire of rhymes, books and stories that they can retell. Children will be taught to read and engage with a wide range of texts, including non-fiction, fiction and poetry. 

Implementation

All staff create a love of reading and a culture of reading for pleasure within their classrooms alongside teaching the necessary skills for the two dimensions of study: word reading and language comprehension. Our reading curriculum is mapped clearly and in detail to ensure the consistency of content and teaching approaches; as well as setting clear expectations for each year group. The map includes a wide range of high quality texts across many different genres so all children are exposed to these varied texts.

Our whole school approach to the teaching and learning of reading involves the following:

• Clear leadership of reading which provides all staff with high quality CPD opportunities through workshops, clear planning guidance, in-class modelling and team teaching. Monitoring of planning, teaching and outcomes ensures the consistency of approach and correct pitch for each group. 
• Clear documentation is given to all staff which outlines the progression of skills and outcomes in reading to ensure the consistency of teaching across all phases from early reading in EYFS through to Upper Key Stage 2. This ensures staff understand and are confident with how the progression of reading skills works as a continuation of development. 
• A culture of reading for pleasure will be fostered through regular opportunities for all children to independently choose and read from a wide range of high-quality books and other texts for their own enjoyment. Teachers should model a positive attitude towards reading at all times.
• Regular library sessions in the school library where children will also be taught to treasure, cherish and respect literature.
• Daily storytimes will ensure children are consistently exposed to new, high level texts in an accessible way, and teachers have daily opportunities to model reading. 
• Teaching will focus on developing pupils’ competence in both word reading and language comprehension; understanding that different kinds of teaching are needed for each.
• Early reading is a priority at Kaizen and we implement this with high quality phonics teaching across the school, particularly in EYFS and KS1 to ensure the underpinning notion that the letters on the page represent the sounds in spoken words. High quality phonic work is our prime approach to teaching early reading; we have developed a highly skilled team of practitioners that ensure all children meet their full potential for phonic knowledge and early reading skills. This approach has led to well above national outcomes in phonics. We ensure that phonic work is a continued part of our approach throughout the key stages, particularly for those who need further consolidation of their phonetic knowledge. 
• Comprehension skills develop through pupils’ experience of high-quality discussion with the teacher, as well as from reading and discussing a range of stories, poems and non-fiction. All pupils must be encouraged to read widely across both fiction and nonfiction to develop their knowledge of themselves and the world in which they live, to establish an appreciation and love of reading, and to gain knowledge across the curriculum.
• The teaching of speaking and listening will help to support the comprehension skills required to be a fluent reader. Metacognitive talk will be used and facilitated by staff to deepen children’s understanding and comprehension of what they are reading.
• Regular events such as Roald Dahl Day, World Book Day, Sponsored Read, Scholastic Book Fair and the Summer Reading Challenge will be used to build on children’s positive attitudes towards reading, as well as visits to our local library and bookshop. 

Components of the teaching of reading:

Shared Reading: During lessons, teachers model reading fluently with pupils a range of texts focusing on comprehension and specific features in relation to objectives. Daily story time is timetabled in every class where an enjoyable text, preferably child-chosen, is read to the children purely for pleasure and social enjoyment.

Reading Gym: Reading Gym lessons take place at least four times a week, if not daily. Each child should have regular opportunities to read aloud in a session supported by their teacher. Follow up activities should be linked to this text and should be stimulating and meaningful. Both the teacher-supported read/discussion and independent activities should be based around one or more of the four key reading skills, predict, clarify, question and summarise. .

English lessons: English planning will be based around high-quality core texts that usually link to the specific curriculum theme of that year group. A week of immersive reading and responding activities will constitute the first teaching phase of all English topics. All English planning will follow the three part phase structure of ‘reading as readers, reading as writers and writing as writers’ and will focus on a reading and writing range of fiction and non-fiction. 

Independent reading: Teachers should make ample opportunity for children to free-read without overly monitoring and directing their reading. This allows children free exploration and agency of their reading; helping them to develop positive and self-motivated attitudes towards reading.

Book borrowing: All children have access to the Reading Space where they can browse and borrow from a wide range of literature, largely informed by pupil voice. Children visit once a week as part of their timetable. Year groups also have class book corners, which provide additional opportunities for independent book browsing and borrowing. There is a mix of independent and social reading practice during this time. 

Storytimes: Teachers use a list of book recommendations to select high quality books to read aloud to our children. This is an important part of the day where we read to children using facial expressions, intonation and provide a rich vocabulary through different texts. 

Reading for pleasure: Children from year 2 and beyond are invited to select their own reading material from their class book area. This is a time for children to develop their own reading preferences and to learn that reading can be fun.  We want our children to become autonomous readers who know their own reading likes and dislikes. 

We understand that children have missed opportunities of learning because of the COVID outbreak and the resulting distance and blended learning models that were used in the previous school years. Our current teaching model ensures that any missed opportunities are addressed before teaching new concepts and topics. This pre-teaching approach ensures that children are able to access the new learning and build upon their knowledge and skills.

At Kaizen, we recognise that some children will have to follow their own journey of learning to read.  Therefore, learners with SEND will have access to the same RWI programme but the delivery of it will be adapted to ensure a tailored approach is provided in order to suit the child’s needs. Strategies used to support our SEND learners include: 

• A slower pace of introducing sounds and letters. 
• Repetition and revisiting previously taught sounds. 
• Sounds taught to children using a multi-sensory approach. 

Impact

The successful approach at Kaizen results in a flourishing culture of reading for pleasure across the school, alongside the high quality teaching of reading which provides children with the integral life skill of literacy. Exposure to a wide range of high quality children’s literature will ensure that children also develop culturally, intellectually, emotionally and socially. This combination of passion, skill and knowledge will result in life-long positive relationships with reading for all of our children. Every child will read confidently and fluently and will be equipped for all the potential reading they will be exposed to throughout their secondary education and future lives. Children will be clear about the careers available to them as part of our ‘Future Me’ aspect of the curriculum and continue to explore opportunities available to them.

Teaching Reading at Kaizen