Reading at Maple Court Academy

Subject Leader: Mrs Cadman

Phonics Lead: Mrs Hurlstone

Vision

Here at Maple Court Academy, we believe that reading is fundamental to each child’s education and underpins the success of becoming great communicators, readers, and writers. We ensure to facilitate this by putting reading at the epicentre of children’s education. Children are exposed to a wide breadth of texts though our engaging libraries; encouragement of reading for pleasure and our reading rich curriculum and environments within our classrooms; daily reading sessions and daily shared story time. Our staff promote a love of reading and encouraging this within out children. We carefully select our whole class text for each year group to ensure children build a literacy heritage from quality texts which promotes access to interesting and meaningful texts. We believe that reading is a ticket to a successful and fulfilled future and ensure that each child will be able to read fluently, and with confidence, to support their future.

Our Aims at Maple Court:

• For all children to become fluent and expressive readers
• For all children to enjoy the pleasures of reading
• For all children to become reflective and independent readers
• For all children to be able to engage in high quality texts
• For children to develop a rich vocabulary
• For children to be able to grow their imagination through exposure to a range of books
• For children to be given the tools to decode words through the use of phonics (Little Wandle)

Why Reading Matters

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go,” ― Dr. Seuss

Some children will start school with the exposure of lots more words than another child, mainly through language rich exposure through talk and books from home. Regardless of a child’s early experience, if they are taught to read systematically from the day they begin school it will dramatically impact on their development in turn positively impacting on their future. Children need to be taught to read and encouraged to keep reading.

Reading for Pleasure

Children who enjoy reading and continue to read will positive impact their future education and life. Making sure that children become engaged with reading from the beginning is the most important wat to have an impact on their life. To encourage this here at Maple Court Academy we will:

• Expose children to an engaging range of quality texts
• Read with each child
• Have discussions about books
• Share an enjoyment of reading
• Rewarding reading engagement through gifts of a book (book vending machine)
• Populate classroom libraries with quality and engaging texts.
• Have regular visits to the school libraries

Guided Reading

At Maple Court we have Guided Reading 4 times a week in Key Stage 2 to ensure children are exposed to a range of quality texts, engage in quality dialogue around language and share thoughts and ideas, ensuring books are central to their education.

Our Guided Reading sessions are text based and have a clear focus on building fluency ensuring children re-read the text to ensure they can comprehend and explore the text at a deeper level. The sessions are underpinned by a focus on high-quality dialogue between both peers and teacher to pupil to extend pupils thinking and provide opportunities to explore themes/concepts in dept. This is facilitated through effective questioning. Here at Maple Court we have a real focus on retrieval and inference skills for the first term.

Home School Diaries

Home school diaries are given to each child to enhance communication between home and school. When children are heard read the staff members will provide and constructive comment which can be shared with parents. The comment will praise the reading skills identified and provide developmental next steps. Parents/carers can also record when a child has read at home and leave a comment. Our expectation here at Maple Court Academy is that children read 5 times each week at home.