Reading at Broomhill

At Broomhill, we strive to create a text-rich environment for all of our children which appeals to their interest. Reading is at the heart of many of our cross curricular topics, showing children that reading is of upmost importance. Our children enjoy reading and in recent action research (October 2021) the majority of pupils shared that they love reading.

Reading for Pleasure

Within the school day, reading for pleasure is promoted. Children have voiced enjoying listening to their teachers read. Daily story is an integral part of our school day and many of our pupils fully engage with story time. We aim to instil a love for reading throughout school by modelling positive relationships with reading to children. Staff talk about the books and the texts they read with children and book recommendations are shared. Throughout the school day children are given time to enjoy reading their own books. Adults in school listen to children read on a regular basis.

Children have the option to read physical books or they can access E-books. All children have a Collins E-book account, where they can select a number of books to read that interest them. We recognise that many children read on tablets outside of school and this offers children an alternative way to enjoy reading for pleasure. 

To further encourage reading for pleasure, we build links with our feeder school Butlers Hill on a regularly basis. Year 5 and 6 pupils enjoy listening to children in Year 2 read and do this in the Summer Term.

At various times throughout the school year, opportunities for reading in paired classes is promoted and enjoyed by children.

The Teaching of Reading

Throughout the week, children participate in a variety of reading activities including: whole class guided reading, discrete reading comprehension lessons- where we focus on Reading Vipers, paired reading and individual reading time.

All pupils are taught to read for meaning, drawing on the full range of reading opportunities specified in the National Curriculum, where specific objectives are taught in each year group. This teaching will be undertaken during individual, paired, grouped or whole class reading activities. More challenging reading skills will be taught explicitly through our weekly guided reading sessions, which is taught using whole class teaching. Guided Reading covers all the reading assessment foci so that children are prepared to answer a variety of question types – such as inference and deduction, and information retrieval, vocabulary based questions and summarising based questions.

Books are colour banded according to difficulty throughout school so that children are familiar with the level at which they are working and can independently choose an appropriate book for themselves. In classrooms the availability of a wide range of reading materials means children can choose books themselves by browsing their class reading corner/ area independently. All classrooms have child friendly book corners with books that interest our children, allowing children to browse at their own pace.  Children are free to choose books from the book corner and are not restricted to colour banding. Each pupil holds a reading record (planner) to be used as a home/school link and may be used to communicate about the child’s reading. Class librarians regularly update and change the books that are in class reading corners/ areas so children get a chance to read a variety of different books.

Reading comprehension (and the appropriate skills) is taught weekly and may be applied across the curriculum, to support reading comprehension assessments and target setting. We expose children to a wide range of reading material and comprehension based activities to aid their comprehension skills. 

Support with Early Reading

We support children who struggle with reading by giving them targeted interventions- which children thoroughly enjoy. Close monitoring and evaluation shows children (and adults) enjoy our Project X and Code reading interventions and these enable children to make good progress.  

As a school, we follow Essential Letters and Sounds to teach phonics. This is a systematic, synthetic phonics program that has been approved by the DfE. Children are taught phonics in differentiated groups daily. For those who need them, phonetically decodable books are read, meaning children experience success when reading. They  also apply their phonics knowledge to the books they read.