Stanway Fiveways Primary School

At Stanway Fiveways Primary School, we believe that developing secure reading skills empowers children to make strong educational progress across the curriculum, both with us and as they proceed onwards.

We adhere to the theory that reading is exercise for the brain: strengthening connections and helping to forge new ones. It positively impacts on a child’s ability to concentrate for sustained periods of time. Reading teaches a child about the world around them and about events outside of their own experience. A child who reads, has a developed imagination and can relate to other people through their experience of interacting with fictional characters. Therefore, their communication skills and ability to empathise increase, socially preparing them for their future life and widening their opportunities. Additionally, exposure to literature improves a child’s vocabulary and writing skills: they subconsciously absorb new words, sentence structures and punctuation which are subsequently displayed in their writing.

Our Primary School fundamentally embraces the belief that reading is one of life’s greatest pleasures. We promote the love of reading from the moment each young learner joins our school community. We read to our children regularly, talk about books, model good reading behaviours and offer appealing places to read. Authors are regularly welcomed to Stanway Fiveways to share their experiences and read from their books. These are exciting and memorable occasions for the children and are part of our commitment to their cultural capital development. Our children are encouraged to appreciate literature as an avenue to adventure, friendship, escape and relaxation due to our embedded culture of reading for enjoyment. It is extremely important for the children at Stanway Fiveways to learn to read though phonetically aligned texts. Therefore, our early reading books are matched to the phases of our chosen phonics scheme (an based upon the Letters and Sounds guidance). Learning in this way, ensures synchronised progress across the areas of English. As each child is assessed as ready to move on, they continue to develop their reading fluency through a meticulous system of home-school linked progression with exposure to banded books from a range of schemes to offer breadth and variation. We view each child as an individual on their own progress path and support them through the provision of ability matched books until the point that they are able to make appropriate independent choices.

Every classroom has an extensive library of age-appropriate high quality fiction texts for the children to enjoy individually, in groups or as a class. We believe that it is important to teach writing through reading and therefore provide at least one enticing text for every unit of our Whole School Writing Curriculum. We assist our children to become high quality writers through this exposure and believe they enjoy the familiarity of learning in a consistent and rehearsed way. Furthermore, it helps the children at Stanway Fiveways appreciate that reading is about more than just stories and can confidently read newspaper articles, instructions, letters, diaries and non-chronological reports. Additionally, each History, Geography and Science Topic is supported by current, key-stage matched non-fiction books.

Whilst we incorporate reading into as much of our teaching as possible, we also teach Reading as a discrete subject through the implementation of Whole Class Reading. This programme of skills driven learning is tailored to ensure every child in our care becomes a ‘Balanced Reader’ who can decode, read with fluency and skilful phrasing, comprehend both literally and inferentially and respond eloquently.