AT SOUTHROYD WE ENCOURAGE OUR CHILDREN TO READ TO SUCCEED
Our Ethos:
At Southroyd we are passionate about reading: we are very much 'a reading school'. It has always been our aim to foster a love of reading and help children to understand that reading is not just a subject, but the route to a lifetime of opportunities.
From your child's beginning at school, they are prepared in every way to become a passionate reader and they learn to understand why it is such a valuable skill to have.
As well as providing our children with engaging, challenging and inspirational reading lessons throughout their time at Southroyd, we also see reading as a much wider component across a full and diverse curriculum.
Books, books, books!
At Southroyd we provide a variety of style and level of reading books to meet all needs. We value the involvement of parents highly and most especially in hearing our children read. Whether this is done at home or with the help of parents working with children in school, we actively encourage parents and other family members to be involved in the child’s reading development. Our recommended reading list for each year group has been developed by staff and children. These lists are created to support parents in exposing their child to a wide range of children’s literature both modern and classic. We also have developed a range of book lists to support different curriculum areas.
At Southroyd we believe that free access to high quality texts is vitally important in the development of the child’s interest in, and appreciation of, reading. To this end, all classrooms have reading corners/mini-libraries, and also book displays and collections related to on-going topic work. These areas are engaging and promote a love of reading and exposure to our literary heritage. They include child-led book recommendations and opportunities to respond to their personal reading. Every class will have a class novel that they are reading together.
Useful Links
Reading Lessons at Southroyd
At Southroyd, we use a whole-class approach to Guided Reading. This allows children to work on specific reading comprehensions skills: retrieval, inference, vocabulary analysis including authorial choice, sequencing and summarising, predicting, explaining and comparing. Children analyse a text extract in detail using these comprehension skills and talk strategies. They then answer questions independently in their reading journals.
Our Reading Spine
Our Southroyd Reading Spine maps out the key texts that are used by each year group. These may be high quality class novels or texts that are used in English or to support and enrich learning in our foundation subjects. This list is fluid and will change each year in response to: new titles, world events, pupil voice etc.
Our Intent:
- Teach and support children to become fluent and confident readers
- Foster an interest in texts of different genres and media, and an appreciation of the value of books for learning and enjoyment.
- Help children develop a love of reading and introduce them to texts that represent our literary heritage
- Develop reading comprehension skills to enable children to analyse and appreciate a range of texts
Diversity and Reading
At Southroyd, we believe that identifying with characters in literature is a vital part of opening the door to reading for pleasure. This powerful hook of recognition can lead to a lifelong love of reading and positive self-image. As a school we strive to ensure that diversity is reflected in the books that we recommend for the children. These books represent the importance of children seeing themselves and their world reflected in the books that they read and enjoy. As well as this, they allow other children to experience a diversity that might not be reflected in their own life experiences.
Our year group booklists highlight texts and authors that positively represent ethnicity, disability, LGBTQ+, neurodiversity, blended families etc. We also promote a range of titles within our Diversity section: Love Has No Labels, My Beliefs, Black History, Refugee Week, Mental Health.
All staff at Southroyd are passionate about reading!
Take a look at our ideas on intent and implementation of the reading curriculum from our Staff Meeting.
