Our Reading Intent 

At Carlton Primary Academy we have a passionate vision for the Reading curriculum, which has links to the academies mission statement. The aims of the national curriculum are embedded throughout each key stage leading to a curriculum which is highly ambitious and designed to meet the needs of all pupils. Reading is underpinned by precise, current, robust research, which is embedded throughout the curriculum. We will provide a highly ambitious and precisely designed curriculum in response to all pupils including those who have SEND and those who are disadvantaged. Our pupils will access content and make progress through personalising the reading curriculum. The reading curriculum is focused upon fostering that love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment. We identify that reading is one of the most essential aspect of life, and we will faithfully ensure that all children will develop a lifelong passion for reading be it for pleasure or academic purposes. The curriculum is designed in response to the needs of all children; enabling all pupils to access content and make progress. The curriculum is demanding and highly engaging for all pupils, matching activities to the curriculum content precisely and setting high expectations, promoting our core value of excellence. Curriculum resources and teaching material are of high quality, ambitious, inspiring and supports pupils’ acquisition of knowledge and skills precisely, encouraging pupils to take pride in their reading skills. The Reading curriculum is precisely sequenced bridging the gap between the EYFS and KS1 curriculum, so that skills and knowledge are incrementally progressed across year groups, enabling progress to be evidenced across school. Vocabulary is embedded throughout the Reading curriculum from EYFS upwards. Children gain knowledge, understanding and respect for differences in culture, religion, ethnicity and society through research and the carefully planned range of ‘anchor texts’ and ‘core books’ which explore and link many areas of the curriculum through science, history, geography, art and design and design technology. An integral part of the reading curriculum is our range of texts and reading opportunities that embrace themes such as loss, migration, BAME, strong females and LGBT where it is evident that we break down language barriers, cultural prejudices and societal differences. The curriculum ensures that pupil’s progress successfully to their next stages of education and beyond, understanding what learning will be key to their success in becoming valued members of their community. The curriculum is coherently designed for pupils to experience a well-sequenced, clear path to learning, connecting new knowledge to existing knowledge.

Roaring Readers 

The reading curriculum is planned to support and challenge all pupils on their journey to becoming successful lifelong readers. In order to promote our pupils’ creativity, expression and imagination, the reading curriculum include a wide range of texts covering a vast range of themes which will allow them to access life after Carlton Primary Academy. Teaching Reading is closely linked to the writing cycle. Through the inclusion of reading content and context in the writing cycle there is a real end product that the children have applied all their reading knowledge in order to create. Moreover, to break down language barriers, cultural prejudices and societal differences, the reading curriculum is linked closely to our enquiry to allow pupils to express themselves.

To ensure coverage and progression of reading at Carlton Primary Academy, teachers use progression documents (Y1 – Y6) with the learning objectives taken directly from the National curriculum closely supported by the use of teaching the reading domains. Each session follows a consistent structure - 

• Introduce the question domain and the linked learning objectives.

• Warm up

• Teaching activities – text reading.

• Response to text.

• Questioning – including the exam rubric to support with NFER/SATs.

The use of reading is continually developing to embrace new innovations:

• Reading will be either linked to enquiry through the ‘anchor texts’ or using the ‘core texts’ addressing cultural prejudices and societal differences so children are able to apply their wealth of knowledge;
• Enriching Vocabulary is promoted throughout the whole reading curriculum;
• Reading is used to address current and previous issues within society, from archaic to LGBT texts;
• The structure of a reading session is to teach a specific reading domain skill and then allow the children to apply it using carefully chosen extracts of text.
• The highly innovative and meticulously chosen texts are applied to prepare children for life after Carlton.

In each Roaring Readers session the children will be taught a content domain that will link to a year group objective taken from the National Curriculum. The children are taught to be able to define and use these content domains to develop their reading skills. 

KS1 Reading Domains 

1a. Draw on knowledge of vocabulary to understand texts.

1b. Identify / explain key aspects of fiction and non-fiction texts, such as characters,            events, titles and information.

1c. Identify and explain the sequence of events in texts.

1d. Make inferences from the text.

1e. Predict what might happen on the basis of what has been read so far.

KS2 Reading Domains 

2a. Give / explain the meaning of words in context.

2b. Retrieve and record information / identify key details from fiction and non-fiction.

2c. Summarise main ideas from more than one paragraph.

2d. Make inferences from the text / explain and justify inferences with evidence from the text.

2e. Predict what might happen from details stated and implied.

2f. Identify / explain how information / narrative content is related and contributes to meaning as a whole.

2g. Identify / explain how meaning is enhanced through choice of words and phrases.

2h. Make comparisons within the text.

At Carlton Primary Academy we use a combination of Read Write Inc (our SSP) in conjunction with Oxford Reading Tree to build a comprehensive reading offer to all our pupils.

In FS1, each week the children take home a lilac ORT picture book to develop their story telling skills, their love of books, exposure to themes in stories and to engage with sequencing and characters. In addition to this, children will be able to choose a picture book from the library that can be read to them by an adult at home; igniting that connection between parents and children sharing a good story together.

As the children move into FS2 they still have access to the lilac ORT picture books but they now start their journey through the RWI programme. All of these books that children take home are phonetically decodable for sounds they are learning that week. The children will take home a RWI book bag book with the corresponding paper copy of the RWI book taught in class that week. In addition, to a picture book from the library that can be read to them by an adult at home.

As the children move into KS1 they progress through the RWI programme. They take home a RWI book bag book and a paper copy of the RWI book they are being taught. These books are kept for a week so the children can become confident, fluent readers with the skills to answer questions about the story they have read. These also provide our children with a rich and varied choice of writing styles, genres and artwork styles to enjoy.

When children graduate from the RWI programme, we follow Oxford Reading Tree and the Benchmarking Book Band levelling structure designed to support the teaching of reading in class and to ensure that when a child takes a book home they can read it successfully, build confidence and make progress. All our books are banded into levels and a ‘level’ of a book is determined by a number of factors including phonic knowledge, vocabulary, sentence length, number of words on a page and use of illustrations.

The point at which a child is secure and confident at a given level and ready to move up a band is determined by both the class teacher through regular assessment and a benchmark assessment to support this. It is important to bear in mind that not all levels are of equal size. In the first few years of school, the steps of progress are fairly small, and children will move through a number of levels quite quickly. As children move up the levels, the steps become broader and ‘moving up’ happens less frequently. 

In Key Stage 2 children continue to read levelled Oxford Reading Tree banded non-fiction and fiction books to ensure that each child continues to get a varied and appropriately challenging reading diet. Each level introduces new things and practises the skills and knowledge learned in the previous levels with age-appropriate content. Children can also take a library book home from their classroom or the school library to engage in self-directed reading choices.  After children complete the book banded system, they have further access to a mixture of authors and themes, both fiction and non-fiction, a lot of them inspired by the Anchor Texts and Core Books covered in the wider curriculum. These ‘free reader’ books are longer in length and more demanding in content, increasingly drawing in reading stamina and ‘stickability’ to a good book. These are solely guided by the interests of children and, through the use of pupil voice, always refreshed in responses to ever changing reading landscape.

Anchor Texts 

Children gain knowledge, understanding and respect for differences in culture, religion, ethnicity and society through research and the carefully planned range of ‘anchor texts’ which explore and link many areas of the curriculum through science, history, geography, art and design and design technology. The curriculum is coherently designed for pupils to experience a well-sequenced, clear path to learning, connecting new knowledge to existing knowledge.

Core Books

An integral part of the reading curriculum is our 'Core Books'. Our range of texts and reading opportunities that embrace themes such as loss, migration, BAME, strong females and LGBT where it is evident that we break down language barriers, cultural prejudices and societal differences. The curriculum ensures that pupil’s progress successfully to their next stages of education and beyond, understanding what learning will be key to their success in becoming valued members of their community.

Why we chose the Core Books?

The themes of the core books are taken from the Reading Reconsidered Reading Spine based upon the Common Core standards. This was to define a common core of knowledge and skills that students should develop in education so they will graduate from Secondary School prepared for university or careers. This links to our values of enabling our children to become life-long readers to enable them to be successful in life after Carlton Primary Academy.

The common core standards push teachers to read harder text. Specifically, the designers have suggested increasing difficulty level of the average text by two years. This idea of a harder text is progressive but how to measure text difficulty is a challenge.

Common core uses Lexiles, a quantitative measure of a sentence. A Lexile text measure represents a text’s difficulty level on the Lexile Scale. When they are used together, they can help a reader choose a book or other reading material that is at an appropriate difficulty level. The Lexile reader measure can also be used to monitor a reader’s growth in reading ability over time.

The common core exemplar texts were taken and inferred a target range for our teachers to use in choosing texts. The Lexiles can be flawed, so it was set out to find other ways to measure text complexity.

It was here that the five plagues of the developing reader were created —five forms of text complexity that are especially challenging and important AND that all students need to have extensive experience with during their school years if they want to hope to compete in college.

Our Amazing Reading Environments

Throughout the school we have exciting and inviting reading areas. The children can find a wide variety of books to read at their pleasure. Some reading environments are enhanced with soft furnishings to have a cosy place to read. Every classroom has a 'Core Book' display that is uniform throughout the school. The children will read 5 core books a year as it runs on a two year cycle.