Our Approach to Teaching Reading

Intent: What we want our pupils to learn?

At Barham, we strongly believe that developing children’s reading skills is fundamental to education and that it enables children to gain access to and thrive in all areas of the curriculum.

We have an English curriculum that is coherently and logically sequenced which is designed to empower and challenge all of our pupils, coming from various parts of the world, so that they become Global citizens of the 21st century. Our English curriculum helps our children develop their linguistic skills, but also acquire the cultural capital they need to thrive in Britain and the World. Our school uses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as curriculum drivers.

Embedding excellence at Barham ensures that reading and the explicit teaching of reading is at the heart of and drives our whole curriculum. Barham’s Reading curriculum intends to inspire our children's imagination and love of books, creating the readers, actors, poets and, of course, authors of the future!

Our intent at Barham is to enable all children to be fluent readers who can talk eloquently about a wide range of texts and genres. We support children in developing their reading by exposing them to as many different reading genres as possible, while fostering excitement and love for reading from nursery which is continued right up until they leave us in year 6 and beyond through engagement in texts which reflect our global goals and underpin our curriculum.

Being a fluent reader with a love of books opens up many opportunities to the wider world, as well as enabling the children to access other areas of the curriculum more easily. Because of this, we ensure that reading is part of all areas of the curriculum so that it is seen as a life skill, which opens up the door to richer learning experiences and not just a discrete subject.

We see it as our job to not just prepare children to be “secondary ready” but to be “life ready” as the reading skills which we teach them, they will use for the rest of their lives. It is therefore imperative that school and families work together to ensure our children receive the best opportunities possible.

We want our children to:

• See themselves as a reader and celebrate their success
• Read for pleasure, becoming enthusiastic and reflective readers
• be introduced to language-rich texts, which link to the wider curriculum and respond to children’s interests
• Understand the relevance of reading to themselves and their lives
• Develop resilience as independent readers
• Ensure our children have sound phonic awareness and use a phonics first approach to reading

The most important thing that children will do at school is learn to read.