The Teaching of Reading

Reading is taught systematically and children learn and develop a range of skills in order to read with fluency and understanding. The skills taught include:

Explaining the meaning of words in context;
Retrieving and recording information and identifying key details from fiction and non-fiction;
Summarising the main ideas from more than one paragraph;
Making inferences from the text and be able to explain and justify these inferences with evidence from the text;
Predicting what might happen from details stated and implied;
Identifying and explaining how information or narrative content is related and contributes to meaning as a whole;
Identifying and explaining how the meaning is enhanced through the choice of words and phrases;
Making comparisons within the text.

The teaching and learning of reading skills is through using high quality texts, which cover a range of genres, using carefully planned questions designed to challenge and create discussion. Lessons provide a balance of whole class teaching as well as small group teaching. Children have the opportunity to read independently at their own level, to read in a group supported by the teacher or another adult and also to share a text as a whole class with the teacher. South Green has a library from which children are encouraged to borrow both fiction and non-fiction books to take home. Parents are encouraged to help children with their reading.

How teachers support children to develop their reading

Expose children to high level texts covering a range of genres and authors.
Provide opportunities for children to analyse ‘the tools’ that authors use to create high quality texts.
Develop language through reading high quality texts in class and provide opportunities to discuss meaning.
Ensure that children recognise that each word in a text has been chosen over others to convey meaning.

KS2 Reading Mastery

We aim for all children to achieve mastery in their reading skills and this means that a child is able to demonstrate the following:

Children are actively engaged in their reading – they can talk about their writing and the reading process and can identify different genres and themes in what they are reading.
Children can read high level vocabulary words and texts fluently and without hesitation.
Children can use inference skills to determine the meaning of higher level vocabulary words without the use of a dictionary.
Children can explain and discuss why the author has used specific words in the text.
Children can apply their reading skill across the curriculum.
Children understand the morphology (structure of words and parts of words, such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes) and etymology of words (word origins), and use this to establish meaning.
Children can compare and discuss themes from a range of authors.
Children demonstrate resilience in close reading.
Children use their in-depth knowledge and understanding of grammar, spelling and punctuation to comment on the effectiveness of texts.
Children can find and summarise information independently from a range of texts.
Children can make predictions, at the appropriate level for their year group, based on what they have read, and explain them.
Children can take part in discussions about a text by debating and justifying their opinion.

How teachers facilitate the children being able to be masters of their own learning in reading:

Provide opportunities for children to read high quality texts aloud.
Provide children with opportunities to analyse and discuss what has been read.
Emphasise the importance of skim reading to find the key elements of a text.
Provide opportunities for children to share any rich and sophisticated vocabulary that they have found in a text - display these around the room for others to magpie.

Instil a great pleasure of reading by ensuring that a range of exciting texts are discussed in lessons and available to take out on loan from the library.