Reading

At Ramsey Junior School, reading is at the heart of everything we do. It is the lighthouse and the driver behind our curriculum. Our bespoke reading spine and curriculum demonstrates our high aspirations for our children and our desire to foster a love of reading for all children. 

Context: Ramsey is a market town situated close to both Peterborough and Huntingdon. It is a growing community with an increasing number of children requiring additional support inside and outside of the classroom as well as requiring pupil premium funding. We are proud to support so many of our families through our joint partnerships and develop long-lasting relationships with them. 

Intent: We aim to represent our children in as many ways as possible. Our bespoke reading spine ensures that children have the opportunity to see themselves within the books we cover, as well as develop their wider understanding of the world. We want to ensure that our children become fluent, confident readers who love reading. Cultural capital and diversity is important to us and we reflect this through our book selections and text choices. 

Aims: Our aim is for all children across the school to have access to high-quality, engaging texts, reading lessons and experiences that develop their love of reading both within and outside of the classroom. We want our children to be both supported and challenged so they are best able to achieve their full potential within the area of reading.

Our approach: At Ramsey Junior School, all children are exposed to a rich and varied diet of texts. Reading is prioritised at our school. Through our daily whole-class reading sessions, children are taught how to explore different texts and to foster a love of language. Alongside this, we continue to focus on texts across our curriculum, through the topics we teach, which is evident through our choices of cross-curricular texts. We have a weekly ‘Book Club’ session where children move to a different classroom to enjoy a Reading for Pleasure session alongside a mix of children from all year groups. This is a true highlight of the week, which children and adults look forward to. We also understand the importance of supporting those who may still require support with regards to phonics instruction and this is carefully timetabled to provide specific, targeted support following the Unlocking Letters and Sounds scheme used by our partner Infants school. This allows for continuity and consistency as children move from one school to another. 

Reading Spine: Each year group has its own bespoke reading spine which was developed following research into many different templates. We sought advice on which texts to use and carefully mapped these out alongside our curriculum as well as taking into consideration key principles and protected characteristics. Each classroom displays their text selections which are changed each half term. 

Library: We are incredibly lucky at Ramsey Junior School to have such an amazing space for our library. All pupils have a weekly timetabled library slot which is used to explore different texts, enjoy listening to stories or to spend time reading independently or with friends. We have a dedicated team of librarians and reading ambassadors who ensure that our library is kept looking beautiful and regularly change and update the displays. Alongside our main school library, you will see many book-based displays around our school and wherever we can we aim to provide books that link directly with the displays. Every classroom has a dedicated area for their ‘class library’ and children regularly enjoy books from these. 

Reading Ambassadors: We have a team of children who have been selected to represent the school as reading ambassadors. These children demonstrate their love of reading through recommending books to others, setting challenges for the school and by leading by example. We are very proud of our ambassadors.

Reading events: We hold many different reading-based events across the school year including celebrating World Book Day and Roald Dahl day, theatre company visits, author visits (both online and in person), book fairs, after school bedtime reading events and our weekly ‘Read for the Weekend’ prize. Each week a lucky child is chosen to take home the class book and a sachet of hot chocolate to enjoy over the weekend. A lovely way to celebrate reading and end each week with a treat. 

Our whole-class reading lessons: Within our daily whole-class reading lessons, children are taught how to develop their fluency and understanding when reading. We regularly read aloud to, and with the children, to model how to read with expression and how to find enjoyment in reading. We use a mixture of class and paired discussions as well as time for individual thinking and reflection on the texts we are covering. Children are exposed to a variety of question types ranging from retrieval-based questions where they need to find the answers directly in the text, to questions that require a deeper level of thinking and where they are required to support their answers with evidence and justifications. We place an emphasis on vocabulary and understand the importance of vocabulary development in our children, so every session will contain an element of vocabulary instruction. We want our children to leave our school with a wide understanding of words and their meaning as well as the tools to derive this understanding when encountering new vocabulary. We use ‘book talk’ to discuss our opinions on texts and what makes texts impactful. We also encourage our children to be critical of texts and to discuss what they don’t like or would change about them. We are aware that not every text suits every child and aim to educate children in being able to identify why this might be for them. Through the use of ‘themed’ lessons, we also ensure that the children we teach are exposed to a wide range of text types including non-fiction and poetry alongside fiction. 

Newsletter: We want our parents to be as informed as possible about what we are doing in school and to celebrate with us. We send a reading newsletter home to all parents every half term to summarise what we have been doing in reading over the weeks.