Building on Meanwood’s vision and values and the National Curriculum for Reading, we aim to provide an exceptional reading education that embraces our school vision. The basic skills of reading are vital for the life opportunities for our children.

Open Hearts – We create a cooperative learning environment, encouraging children to work together, share ideas and learn collaboratively. 

Open Minds – We inspire our children to strive for excellence in reading, supporting them to develop fluency and challenge their thoughts, opinions and taste. Children are taught to learn to read, then read to learn. We celebrate their achievements and encourage them to reach their full potential. 

Open Arms – We foster empathy in our pupils by encouraging children to understand and appreciate various text types and exposing them to a diverse range of texts, we not only help them see themselves in literature but also foster a love for reading that will accompany them throughout their lives. We promote an inclusive environment where all learners feel valued and supported in their reading journey.

Intent

At Meanwood we are a reading school. This starts with staff who act as positive reading role models and foster their own love of reading in their children. The curriculum has been designed with reading at its core and it is woven across all curriculum areas. We share and promote a love of reading for all pupils as we recognise that learning to read raises children’s self-esteem and self-efficacy and develops the wider characteristics of effective learning. From beginning our school, we prepare our children in every way to become passionate readers and allow them to understand why it is such a valuable skill to have. We sustain high outcomes for phonics and early reading throughout their time in school. Underpinning all learning at Meanwood is our shared view that an extensive vocabulary and understanding of what is read is the key to success in all areas of the curriculum and helps children to understand and communicate with the world around them, thus developing their cultural capital.  We strive to make sure our children can read accurately, fluently and with understanding and make sure they understand that reading can make a difference throughout their whole lives. All children are exposed to a diverse range of authors and poets and are given the opportunity to read and respond to these texts. We encourage children to see reading as something pleasurable and valuable in their lives, which we know will always have a positive impact for every child moving forward. 

Implementation

At Meanwood, we follow the progression of the planned intended curriculum for all age groups in small learning steps. We follow the whole school reading progression document which is broken down into different disciplines: word reading skills, comprehension skills and comprehension domains. Every class has story time and class poem for the half term.  Early reading: The phonics lessons follow a consistent approach which enables lessons to be taught with pace as everyone understands the routine and what is expected.  Success for All Phonics is based on an evidence-based pedagogy around cooperative learning. In reception, children work on partnerships, engaging in partner talk and extending their own thinking about decoding and comprehension. In year 1, they continue to collaborate in their partner work and support each other wit their decoding and comprehension skills.  The reading session is linked to the weekly shared reader which is designed to be read over five days.  Shared readers are fully decodable texts in a wide range of genres that include familiar characters, settings and topics. It is important that children don't simply know their phonics but can apply that knowledge to the skill of reading itself. The shared readers allow children to practise reading the new and recently taught GPCs as well as the common exception words to which they have been introduced. Year 2 follow the FFT daily spellings lessons with the Jungle Club alongside a daily reading lesson.  KS2: Once children have cracked the phonics code, there is a greater focus on comprehension. Children have daily thirty minutes reading sessions in which they read and comprehend the same text over four days which builds through KS2 following the reading progression document. All texts are sourced from the Literacy Shed and are progressive through each class. The sessions follow the same structure - vocabulary and fluency, before moving onto other disciplines of comprehension (vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval and summary). Pupils examine fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts over a three week period to ensure they are exposed and access a range of genres and text types.

Home Readers: Shared readers are sent home and are fully aligned with the GPCs children have learnt that week. In KS2, outside of the timetabled reading sessions, we ensure all children progress through the reading scheme by encouraging parents to read with their child at home as well as being read with by an adult in school.

Impact

At Meanwood our aim is to keep all the children working together at broadly the same place by taking small steps in learning.  This early intervention helps to ensure that the lowest 20% of children can make progress and reach age-related expectations and this helps to also secure success for all children. Across KS2 class teachers and subject leads identify children that fall into the bottom 20% of readers and these are made priority daily readers where they can develop their comprehension and fluency skills.

Formative Assessment

To ensure any potential gaps in previous expected knowledge are addressed, children are quickly identified after each lesson or weekly sequence from the SSP, and our keep up, catch up approach allows any children who may benefit from small group interventions to have extra phonics interventions in addition to the daily phonics lesson. The children’s progress is assessed using regular formative assessment in lessons through questioning, regular retrieval practice, assessment of work in books and feedback. Before each block of learning, the children complete a pre-knowledge check based on the previous learning. This allows teachers to teach any necessary connected knowledge prior to the starting the new block of work to support the needs of pupils in their classes.

Summative Assessment

Early Reading: Success for All Phonics provides an online Reading Assessment Tool that tests children's knowledge of GPCs, word decoding, reading fluency and comprehension. Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 teachers assess every half term to ensure that they know exactly which phonics skills have been mastered by children.  This provides reports for teachers that identifies pupils that require daily phonics interventions and who will also become a daily reader.

KS2: At the end of each term children complete an NFER reading comprehension assessment. This data is monitored and informs intervention groups as well as daily reader lists. Additionally, teachers use this data alongside formative assessments to inform their own teacher assessment.

Staff Development

Training needs are identified as a result of whole school monitoring and evaluation, performance management and through self-analysis. The subject leaders are keen to share best practice and disseminate up-to-date initiatives to staff via planned CPD and development time. In addition, all teachers and teaching assistants receive annual phonics training at the beginning of the academic year. If any members of staff join the school then this training is part of the induction process.

Monitoring

The subject leader, SLT and Governors all play a role in the monitoring of Reading at Meanwood. Regular monitoring via learning walks, book looks and pupil/staff voice feedback ensures the subject is constantly being reviewed and regulated to ensure the best learning opportunities for all.

Meanwood C of E is a reading school. Click on the link below to see a selection of the diverse, engaging and entertaining books we read throughout the year.