Reading

At Grange Park, we promote a love of reading throughout school life to encourage pupils to develop a lifelong interest and passion for the written word. This is a fundamental skill that helps pupils access the learning they need and opens doors to rewarding further study and career opportunities. Our literacy curriculum is a core component of everything we do at Grange Park.

Aims and purpose

At Grange Park, we value reading as a crucial life skill. Our intention is for our pupils to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose.

Aligned with the National Curriculum, our goals for reading for every child and young person are:

to read easily, fluently and with good understanding.

to be exposed to rich text and language by developing the habit of reading widely and often, both for pleasure and information.

to acquire a wide vocabulary to develop their written and spoken communication skills.

to be equipped with tools to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary.

for all pupils to be exposed to rich text and language that will support their understanding of the world, promote their communication skills and develop their independence as learners.

Prioritising Reading

We prioritise reading in two central ways: 

Children and young people receive high-quality reading provision in their learning time. This comprises reading for pleasure, phonics, comprehension and fluency, ensuring sure that students gain all the skills necessary for them to access and make sense of the world around them.

Our school environment champions a love of reading with dedicated libraries, reading zones, reading clubs, reading competitions/challenges, such as Busters Book club and a book vending machine to reward attainment and effort.

We strive to develop a culture of reading through whole school daily DEAR sessions (Drop Everything and Read), regular library lessons, exciting events and opportunities to engage with texts that are enjoyable and challenging. 

Teachers and Learning Mentors are all responsible for developing pupils’ core literacy skills, including reading, as part of our ambitious curriculum offer from Key Stage 2 to 5.

Each strand of our literacy offer interlinks to enable children the very best provision. Phonics and spellings, reading, writing and oracy (spoken English) are all championed in our knowledge-rich curriculum. The children are provided with extensive opportunities to rehearse and refine these key skills, as well as demonstrate their understanding in innovative and original ways.

Here at Grange Park School, we believe in building a passionate culture of reading across the school to engage and enthuse children about reading. Appointing dedicated librarians, setting up Reading Reward Schemes and our Book Vending Machines (stocked with diverse texts) are all examples of the way we incentivise and bring value to reading.

We also run imaginative events to promote reading for pleasure. For example, at our Stansted site, we hold a popular bedtime story evening for our younger children, while across the whole school our all-day World Book Celebrations are an annual, fun-filled highlight of the calendar.

High Quality Provision

To deliver high-quality reading lessons that are impactful for our children, we have invested in a variety of effective, up-to-date resources. These are then used to support daily reading provision in the classroom and provide opportunities for consolidation and retrieval of key learning.

Where necessary, reading aloud of banded books supplements reading lessons which are taught in all classes from Year 5 upwards. In Year 5 and 6, pupils are taught by the VIPERS approach to reading. The six domains focus on the comprehension aspect of reading and not the mechanics, such as decoding, fluency and prosody. The VIPERS method of ensuring that teachers ask, and students are familiar with, a range of questions. It allows the teacher to track the type of questions asked and the children’s responses to these, which allows for targeted questioning afterwards.

Children across Grange Park also have access to Lexia and Bedrock, our invaluable online reading, grammar and vocabulary programmes.

Curriculum Links

Reading is embedded within Grange Park’s ambitious curriculum to ensure students are consistently developing their confidence, broadening their vocabulary and growing their skillsets.

In English: 

We immerse children in a rich reading environment with an English curriculum based on the study of high-quality, culturally diverse texts. This supports word recognition, decoding, comprehension and vocabulary development. We develop understanding and engagement in books through drama, book talk, oral storytelling and response activities including artwork and story mapping. Carefully selected books form the base for discussion and analysis, extending children’s understanding. They also allow children to explore new vocabulary and language structures. 

In the wider curriculum: 

Our broad curriculum is rich in opportunities which help develop reading skills. Both our libraries and classroom resources are regularly reviewed to ensure they engage students and fully complement the curriculum. Subject teachers take every opportunity to develop reading skills in the wider curriculum, which is reflected in their robust lesson planning. Furthermore, teachers ensure they give pupils the necessary contextual knowledge to allow them to access books with challenging vocabulary.  

In lessons, you would expect to see subject specific vocabulary being embedded and lots of opportunities for studies to read aloud to develop fluency. 

Impact

Our expectations are aspirational, and we anticipate reading standards will rise year-on-year. To ensure the teaching and learning or reading has the intended outcome, continuous monitoring of both pupil progress and Teaching and Learning takes place across the school. Any learner not making expected progress is identified and swift actions are taken to support their success.

We measure reading progress through a variety of methods to ensure we have a consistently evolving picture of each pupil’s ability throughout their learning journey. Assessment is used to identify any child needing additional support as soon as needed.

Grange Park School is a reading community where reading is promoted, valued and enjoyed. A love of reading is evident from the volume of reading embraced across the school day and the popularity of our book corners and libraries.

If you have any questions regarding our reading programme, please contact Paul Devlin (Head of English) at paul.devlin@grangepark.kent.sch.uk or on 01732 882111.

Phonics

Where necessary, pupils who cannot read at age-related expectations will receive urgent, targeted support from fully trained members of staff. Little Wandle Rapid Catch-Up is a complete catch-up programme that mirrors the main synthetic phonics programme but has a faster pace. It has been created to help children catch up quickly.

For children to make rapid progress, Rapid Catch-Up is timetabled as follows:

Day 1 20-minute Phonics Lesson
Day 2 20-minute Phonics Lesson
Day 3 Review Day: A quick review of the teaching from days 1 and 2

10-minute phonics lesson plus 10 to 15-minute Reading Practise Session

In Phases 2 and 3, the blending practise books will be used for this session

Day 4 10 to 15-minute Reading Practise Session
Day 5 10 to 15-minute Reading Practise Session

Any child in KS3 upwards, who needs additional reading support can be placed on the Switch On Reading programme. Intensive and individualised, Switch On is a ten-week reading intervention that is delivered by fully trained adults to ensure these children make rapid progress.

Building on their phonics and literacy skills developed at Key Stage 2, we provide regular 1-1 intervention to support targeted students to develop their essential reading and writing skills. To further embed their core literacy skills, we are introducing the Abigail Steel Key Stage 3 Phonics Programme which will help these students develop their foundational literacy skills with appealing, age-appropriate texts.