“Reading is like breathing in, and writing is like breathing out.”

Pam Allyn

Reading is at the heart of our curriculum and promoting a love of reading is a key part of everything we do as St Chad’s. We aim to encourage a lifelong love of reading and take advantage of the moral and social messages that are raised by the texts we choose in order to encourage the children to become responsible members of the community. Our vision of teaching children to love learning is promoted through our use of high quality texts, the embedding of reading in all curriculum areas and through our reading celebration events.

We believe high quality texts are essential for inspiring children to read and produce their own imaginative fiction and non-fiction texts. Picture books can be very powerful in engaging pupils in valuable discussions where they can debate moral decisions, share predictions and create imaginative ways of innovating the stories. As a result, we have developed a rich bank of picture books, which we use across KS1 and KS2 to inspire writing. Each term, the class’ English learning is centred around a class novel that has been carefully chosen to link to other curriculum areas and engage the pupils in reading and writing.

We believe that reading should be embedded across the curriculum in order for the pupils to understand its value in opening doors to all types of learning. For example, each class has a class set of high quality non-fiction books that link to their topics which can be explored to enhance geographical, historical and scientific understanding and encourage independent research skills. Furthermore, opportunities for children to create their own books are provided in many areas of the curriculum including Computing.

A range of events that celebrate reading also enhance our curriculum provision. Every child in our school has a Reading Buddy from another year group and they meet regularly to share stories that they are enjoying and to read to each other.

The phonics scheme used at St Chad’s is Floppy’s Phonics.  Please see the subject booklet below for more information on how this is implemented.