At Bishopswood, we believe that reading is at the centre of learning. We strive for children to learn to love books.

We believe that every child should be given the tools to develop into an enthusiastic confident reader. Every child is taught a range of strategies to support their development to become a confident, independent reader. Children are encouraged to draw on all these strategies from the outset to make sense of a text. Enjoying books with an adult is an essential tool of learning to read so adults will aim to ensure that the child feel positive about themselves as readers each time they share a book. Children become confident to take risks and have a go at reading. They become fluent, expressive readers. They enjoy reading and discussing books, empathising with characters and giving opinions. Teachers nurture a love of books by introducing books with enthusiasm and enjoyment, promoting a sense of wonder and expectation as the book is explored. Teachers use quality texts in all aspects of their teaching across the curriculum and provide opportunities that extend and enrich the children’s learning. Reading at home is an essential part of learning to read. Children are encouraged to read regularly at home and discuss texts with parents. Children have independent access to a wide variety of high quality texts in the classroom and school library. We aim to bring reading to life and give it purpose by using music, drama and performance. It is these tools and opportunities that we believe give our children the necessary skills to become thoughtful and confident readers for life.

Teaching of Reading

Reading is a fundamental skill for children to acquire and we are keen to equip children with the skills to be independent readers as soon as they are able. Reading is taught to every child in some form every day, through both phonics and reading sessions and we aim to foster a love of reading. 

In Key Stage One we use a systematic scheme to teach phonics daily following the ‘Monster Phonics’ programme from Foundation Stage onwards. During these sessions children are introduced to new sounds in order to de-code new words and recognise the more common words for both reading and writing. More information on this can be found on our Phonics and Early Reading page.

Later on, when reading is more fluent, daily reading sessions are used to provide children with key reading strategies to ensure a greater understanding of the text. Reading also enables pupils both to acquire knowledge and to build on what they already know. The comprehension levels become progressively more complex and the children spend time in a group discussing the structure and language used by the author.

In our school library, as well as in every classroom, we have a large collection of books which are varied in type and level. Children are also given the opportunity each week to borrow books from our school library to share at home with their family, promoting reading for pleasure.

We ask that children read at home as often as possible with a parent or carer, either listening to stories being read to them or reading to adults will support their reading in school.