Reading For Pleasure

At St James' C of E Infant and Nursery School, children will learn to read with confidence, fluency and understanding, providing them with the skills required to achieve a lifetime of enjoyment through reading.

Children read in school independently, in guided groups and as a shared class session. They listen to adults and other children read, taking part in paired reading with their own and other age groups.

Our reading aims are:

• To promote a life long love of reading.

• To promote confidence and positive attitudes to reading through access to a wide range of literature.

• To develop phonetic skills which lead to blending and reading accurately and fluently.

• To broaden their vocabulary, so that children are able to 'read to learn'!

• To develop comprehension skills, and enable children to analyse what they read and to participate in discussion and debate about texts.

• To encourage good home/school partnerships.

• To monitor each child’s progress through the use of a range of assessment strategies e.g.  NFER tests, teacher assessments and RWI assessments etc.

• To support those children who require additional support with their reading.

Reading in school

Many activities take place which promote pre-reading skills. The school uses 'The Literary Curriculum' scheme of work from Reception to Year 2. Through this, pupils have access to a variety of quality texts that are progressive across each year group. This means that the children are exposed to a wide variety of high quality texts, written by esteemed authors.

We compliment this by planning our whole school story sessions and having 'wider reading blankets' so children have continued exposure to a range of authors, genres and exciting books. 

 We firmly endorse bringing together the teaching of reading and writing. Too often they are kept separate, focusing on discrete skills but neglecting the whole experience. Once children have thoroughly enjoyed the experience that the book has to offer the reader, the book is revisited, looking at key episodes, only this time reading as a writer.

As well as our Reading Spine, we also have a wider book blanket offer for children in each year group, which provides further high quality texts that are read in lessons and story time, linked to class topics. They can be viewed in the documents below. 

Developing reading for pleasure

We nurture a love of reading by holding book themed days, creative weeks, author visits, library visits etc as both as individual classes and across the whole school. 

Book Fayres are held regularly to allow all children the chance to look at new books of all genres and hopefully purchase a new book of their own to take home!

Our newly-refurbished school library promotes authors and a range of reading material to appeal to all pupils. Children's suggestions for new books are encouraged and purchased.

For each new class book, a Book Warmer is sent home. This lets parents know of linked books, activities, vocabulary and key questions that they can work with the children on at home. Examples from each year group are shown below.

We also have Buddy the Reading Bear who goes home with one pupil each week. In his crate he has a snuggly blanket, hot chocolate and most importantly, a book to be enjoyed at home. Nursery children have Rosie the Rhyming Rabbit who sends home lots of super Nursery Rhyme books and activities. 

Each of our classrooms has a 'Book Nook' reading area whish is regularly refreshed and updated. The children love spending time in them and talking about the different books they are reading or have read as class readers.

We also have our Reading Sheds, which the children asked to have via their School Council. We even used our Bright Stars competeition to make book bags to help us carry the books home.