Intent

Reading has the highest priority at Backwell Junior School and this is something that we take pride in. Our goal is for not only every child to become a fluent reader but for every child to have an intrinsic love of reading. At our school, we understand how important it is to be able to read at an age-appropriate standard as this greatly improves every child’s life chances. We also believe that through reading aloud daily to our children and prioritising time for us all to discuss and share our love of books, we can further promote reading for pleasure.

Implementation

At Backwell Junior School, children are immersed in a wide range of reading material, whether it is through listening to their class teacher sharing a class novel, through their own independent reader or through a selected text for whole class guided reading. Texts taught in previous years leave a lasting impression and our ‘Power of Reading’ approach to teaching writing though high quality texts, engages pupils of all abilities. A range of topic based non-fiction texts are available for the children to access in each classroom, enabling them to read around their different topics and gain exposure to Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary.

All children have access to a variety of texts on their class bookshelf. As well as parental recording in their Reading Records, children note down the titles read in their individual Reading Logs kept in school, enabling class teachers to monitor for suitability and variety.

Continuity with the West Leigh Infants reading scheme is maintained via assessment data from the Year 2 teachers. This also enables us to highlight children in Year 3 who might need additional support with their phonics/ reading, where through shared data and our own baseline assessment, individual phonic needs are targeted and supported, following an intervention programme for the lowest 20% of children. This is reflected in Years 4, 5 and 6 along with reading intervention for fluency and comprehension. 

We have a school library which houses a large range of non-fiction and fiction texts, colour coded for age-suitability. Classes have the opportunity to visit the library and a lunchtime library club runs twice a week.

A love for reading a wide breadth of books is encouraged and supported through the ’30 Reads’ challenge. This fresh take on our previous reading challenge, is centred around a class set of appealing, diverse, fiction titles as well as non-fiction books linked to year group topics. At the heart of this challenge is the children- the readers themselves. The promotion of ‘book talk’ this year has led to peers recommending books to others; teachers recommending books to their pupils. Waiting lists for the 30 reads books provide a buzz in each classroom.  A recent change to our weekly timetable across the school has led to increased opportunities for teaching reading and reading across the curriculum. Our approach to teaching reading is based on teacher modelling, moving to collaborative discussion and then independent application. Children are all familiar with the ‘Reading Dogs’ a visual representation of the reading comprehension strategies/ domains.

Impact

By the time children leave Backwell Junior School, not only will they be able to read with fluency but they will want to read.  Children will be able to talk enthusiastically about the books they have read and recommend books to others.  Our children will show an understanding of what they read, inferring meaning and be able to comment on an author’s use of language. Our ‘Power of Reading’ led English curriculum, ensures that the children’s writing is always structured around high quality texts, enabling them to engage in all areas of the curriculum.