Intent

At Tylers Green, we aim to give our children a reading curriculum that enables them to become confident, independent and established readers, who can communicate their thoughts and ideas about a text, as well as read and understand a range of genres. We support our children to develop transferable skills, which they can use across the broader curriculum and throughout their lives. We use educational visits, high-quality literature, film and the arts as stimuli, which links learning to real-life experience and develops the children’s positive attitudes for reading. Tylers Green readers leave with the technical skills necessary to read and understand texts in the modern world.

Implementation

Children receive daily 30-minute Guided Reading lessons and are exposed to aspirational, greater-depth expectations for reading a range of texts. Teachers use Literacy Shed Plus and other resources to teach children the core reading skills: Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval, and Summarising (VIPERS). Our pupils hold discussions around a variety of texts and genres, and are taught how to effectively provide reasoned explanations for their views.

In Key Stage 2, children follow the National Curriculum through purpose-based lessons devised by the class teacher, covering a wide range of fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction and reference books or textbooks. It is text, image and experience-based and all units are linked, where appropriate, to the current creative curriculum. This gives children a broad base of knowledge, facts, vocabulary and real-life experience. Our children have the opportunity to develop their reading skills across a range of subjects.

At TGMS, we use the online learning platform, Accelerated Reader, to monitor children’s progress in reading, as well as assess their understanding of texts. Children are able to access a range of reading books that are structured in different ways, so that they are exposed to a wide range of texts and genres. They are able to revisit these genres throughout their school life in order to deepen their mastery.
 

Impact

Assessing reading is an ongoing process that takes place periodically across the year. After the children have finished a book on Accelerated Reader, they are able to take a test, which will assess their understanding of it. Teachers assess reading against the Year group framework. At the end of each term, the teacher makes a judgement based on national age-related expectations, which we have used to develop the Tylers Green reading framework.

Children are assessed as one of the following:

• Working below the national standard (Emerging)
• Working towards the national standard (Developing)
• Working at the national standard (Secure)
• Working above the national standard (Above)

Progress is closely monitored by the subject leader and senior leadership team. Monitoring includes lesson observations, learning walks, termly moderation of teacher assessment, book and planning scrutiny. Other methods that we use are pupil voice interviews, staff meetings for teacher CPD and disseminating best practices.

The findings of this monitoring will be used to inform the next steps for the children and the implementation of writing across the school as a whole.

Phonics

We use Bug Club for phonics, which provides a natural transition from Tylers Green First School. Bug Club is a comprehensive phonics teaching programme centred around an accessible and inclusive teaching approach. All pupils who did not pass their phonics screening in Year 1 or Year 2, or who need extra support with their phonics, use Bug Club in phonics interventions with an adult. These pupils will be given login details and their parents informed, so that parents can support with phonics at home as well.