Reading

Intent

“Reading is the beginning of wisdom.” - Albert Einstein. 

Reading is portable magic. It has the power to train our imagination, transport us to different worlds, and create and hold our dreams. Here at Great Bradfords, we see reading not as a chore, a duty or simply a skill to learn - we see reading as a gift. It’s a gift we are passionate about sharing with our children to ensure they are fluent, confident and lifelong readers.

We want all of our children to develop a love of reading and be able to understand and explore more about the world in which they live, through the knowledge they gain from high-quality texts. By the end of their time with us, we endeavour for all of our children to read fluently, and with confidence, in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education. We also understand the importance of parents and carers in supporting their children to develop both word reading and comprehension skills, and so we want to encourage a home-school partnership which enables parents and carers to understand how to enhance the skills being taught in school through good quality texts.

Here at Great Bradfords, we are proud of what we can offer our children when it comes to unlocking the magic of reading. It starts with a passionate and consistent approach to the children’s phonemic awareness - continuing with prior underpinning knowledge from KS1 and starting to combine phonetic knowledge with more spelling and word recognition techniques. For children that require additional support with decoding and blending words, we follow Little Wandle, which is the same scheme as the neighbouring infant school. 

The fundamental reading skills are skilfully and passionately taught through our whole-class guided reading sessions. Within our whole class guided reading sessions, our children love to listen to modelled reading skills that are often invisible skills employed by good readers, as well as being exposed to rich and varied texts, harnessing their imagination and promoting a love of books from different genres. Additionally, our children love to develop their reading fluency and comprehension skills through the specific teaching of our ‘reading dogs’, which embed their vital comprehension skills. Through our whole class approach, all children are given an equal opportunity to succeed against age-related expectations with teachers and learning support staff providing assistance through targeted conversations and modelling in order to challenge all learners.

Here at Great Bradfords, we are dedicated to using our enthusiasm and expertise to deliver an innovative, engaging and rigorous reading curriculum to unlock the magic of reading.

Phonics

Here at Great Bradfords Junior School, we are proud of what we can offer our children when it comes to unlocking the magic of reading. It starts with a passionate and consistent approach to the children’s phonemic awareness - continuing with prior underpinning knowledge from Key Stage 1 and starting to combine phonetic knowledge with more spelling and word recognition techniques into Key Stage 2. 

For those children who need additional phonetic development after leaving infant school, we offer a robust Systematic Synthetic Phonics Programme – Little Wandle Letters and Sounds – which builds on the prior learning from Great Bradfords Infant School, who use this same government-recommended programme. Here at the junior school, we focus on two specific parts of the programme: the Rapid Catch-Up Programme, and the SEND Programme. This is taught to all children throughout our school who require additional development as a reader. By utilising these programmes, we are able to provide our children with all the skills they require to enable them to develop into fluent, confident readers.