Reading

At Airedale Junior School, all children have an entitlement to high quality reading opportunities. Teachers acknowledge and celebrate the essential part that reading plays in our curriculum and seek many ways to promote healthy attitudes to reading. We actively seek avenues to expand children’s knowledge of authors and vocabulary and above all equip them to use their reading skills in order to access all areas of our curriculum offer.

We model and promote the development of positive attitudes towards reading. It is our intent to create a love of reading which will inspire pupils to read for enjoyment as well as for the acquisition of knowledge.

Children have access to a range of high quality literature in stimulating classroom environments, within our libraries in school and the local library service. We use a variety of methods to ensure that children learn to be skilled readers; shared reading, class reading and one to one reading are all utilised in partnership with parents, alongside a whole school teaching style which supports accuracy, fluency, intonation and understanding.

We see home-school links as a vital part of the reading process. We positively encourage parental involvement in the development of a child’s reading. We hold parental workshops to provide parents with information on how we teach children to read and offer reading afternoons and mornings, where parents and grandparents can share reading activities in school with their children. We actively encourage ‘reading friends’ to help children on their journey to reading fluency. These are volunteers from across the community who work alongside us to positively encourage reading and support our children.

 At Airedale Junior School we use a variety of literature across the curriculum to enhance the exciting topics that we teach. It is our intent to ensure that all children are able to develop and use a range of transferable skills between areas of the curriculum and reading is one of these core skills.

From Year Three to Year Six we teach daily reading lessons. Children are exposed to a range of literature from a wide variety of genre. These lessons focus on the acquisition of new vocabulary to enhance understanding. They teach the children how to use a text to answer evidence based questions and allow them opportunity to ask questions and challenge their own thinking.

Where children enter our school and are not yet fluent readers, a bespoke package is created for them to ensure that their reading skills are supported and they make rapid progress in word recognition, phonic skills and fluency.

Encouraging and fostering a love of reading for all our children is important. Across the school we plan and enjoy regular story time where children are able to listen to their teachers read; be transported into other realms and enjoy the adventures that can be found in stories. Children and staff choose these adventures together from a wide range of authors; popular and medal winning authors, to offer a varied reading experience and thus support their use of language across the curriculum.

It is our intention to ensure that, by the end of their primary education, all pupils are able to read fluently, and with confidence, in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education.

To help support your child's progression in reading, you can visit the Oxford Owl website and access lots of free resources. Use the following link to open the Oxford Owl page for parents.

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/