INTENT

At Hazlemere C of E School, reading is a life skill which is the cornerstone to enabling our children to become articulate communicators, and we use the National Curriculum to do this effectively. We believe that all children should have the opportunity to be fluent, confident readers who are able to successfully comprehend and understand a wide range of texts. We want pupils to develop a love of reading, a good knowledge of a range of authors and be able to understand more about the world in which they live through the knowledge they gain from texts. It is not only key to academic success across the whole curriculum but remains a crucial lifeline which prepares pupils for the next stage of their education. The aim for all of our children is to be able to read fluently and with confidence in many subjects. The foundations for successful reading at Hazlemere C of E School are formed through our comprehensive phonics programme: Essential Letters and Sounds. We understand the importance parents and carers have in supporting their children to develop both word reading and comprehension skills, and so we aim to encourage a home-school partnership which enables parents and carers to understand how to enhance the skills being taught in school through good quality texts. 

IMPLEMENTATION 

There are many layers to the effective teaching of reading at Hazlemere C of E School.  

How we build our reading culture:

• Reading is an essential part of our curriculum offer. To ensure that our reading culture is sustained and embedded, we use a range of strategies that are consistently evolving to adapt to the current needs of our pupils.
• Essential Letters and Sounds is used to provide a systematic and synthetic scheme for phonics.
• Physical reading books which correspond to phonetic sounds are used to support and reinforce phonetic learning and children progress on to our reading scheme. 
• All classes have reading areas where pupils can access a range of books. 
• Early Years : Reading for pleasure is prioritised.  The reading area is accessible to all children; there is a range of books for pupils to choose from.
• Drop Everything And Read sessions - dedicated time on every year group timetable for adults to read aloud a quality text.  
• Weekly class visits to the school library.
• Children are encouraged to read at home every day and select books from the 50 recommended class readers.

Guided Reading: 

We have aligned our teaching of reading with Jane Considine's 'Hooked on Books' approach. ‘Book Talk’ is a systematic way to teach reading strategies progressively across the whole school from Year 1 to Year 6 and covers all the requirements of the national curriculum.  During the week, children take part in 'Book Talk', a whole class guided reading session. In those 'Book Talk' sessions, you will find our children reading by themselves, reading with a partner, reading as a whole class or listening to the class teacher model reading. Children use the 'Reading Rainbow' to read and respond to texts through different lenses within 3 different zones of reading: The ‘Fantastics,’ The ‘Stylistics’ and The ‘Analytics’. Book Talk is key to developing oracy skills. Children collaborate in groups using sentence stems and high utility words to develop a Book Talk response. During a second reading session, the teacher models how to craft and structure comprehension answers and this is followed by children using the same approach to answer questions independently.

Reading Enrichment :

Throughout the school year, the importance of reading is enhanced through World Book Day, author visits, Shakespeare Week, Book Fairs and reading challenges to further enrich our English curriculum. Buddy reading sessions are set up for children to share a book with a buddy from another class.

Language-rich texts for English lessons:

Whole school texts are used throughout the year. Each class teaches specific writing, through language-rich texts to engage the children.