Helping Each Child To Flourish
At Heworth we believe that the teaching of reading is integral to a child’s understanding and appreciation of the world around them; a platform that allows our children to see beyond what they know, share in cultural experiences and develop the vocabulary they need to effectively express themselves. We strive to provide a literacy rich environment, rooted in our four school values and expose children to high quality texts and inspiring learning opportunities. Our reading curriculum strives to develop a lifelong love of reading and through this we want our children to develop a good knowledge of a range of authors and text types and be able to understand more about the world in which they live. This curriculum is delivered through systematic synthetic phonics, a linked approach to shared and guided reading, home reading, reading across the curriculum, regular opportunities for independent reading and hearing high quality texts read aloud every day. All of these are essential components, as they offer the range of opportunities needed to develop, confident, fluent and enthusiastic readers.
The aim of our reading curriculum is:
- To equip children with the skills to become confident, fluent and enthusiastic readers.
- Expose children to a wide range of high quality texts, genres and authors.
- Enable children to read so that they can access a wider curriculum and apply this to the world around them.
What Reading looks like at Heworth
- We follow Early Years Development Matters and The National Curriculum.
- We use a systematic, synthetic phonics programme, ELS.
- Children read phonetically regular texts matched to their current assessed phase in phonics.
- Regular phonic interventions are in place to ensure children keep up and not catch up.
- We use individual reading, guided reading and a whole class reading approach.
- We use high quality texts within English lessons and across the curriculum.
- We have a reading spine of texts for each year group.