We attach great importance upon enabling all children to develop into fluent and confident readers who love books.  To support this idea, we expose the children to a wide range of reading materials, both factual and fiction in our school libraries. Sharing these high quality texts has helped us to create a culture of reading for pleasure across the school; this is also aided by some of our regular volunteers who love to listen to Rucstall children read!  Learning to read is one of the most important things your child will achieve at our school so we are passionate about making sure that every single child learns to read well while also enjoying numerous stories, poems and information books that have been chosen to inspire and enthuse.  In EYFS and Key Stage 1, we use RWI Phonics before children progress on to becoming free readers. 

Reading at Key Stage Two is taught daily. Lessons are focused on a class or group text each week. The children enjoy a rich and diverse range of narratives, poetry and non-fiction texts. Children are taught to develop their fluency and appreciation of narrative. In addition to this, they learn prompts and skills to help evaluate, analyse and articulate answers to comprehension questions. The skills they learn are linked to what we call VIPERS. These are the VIPERS skills:

Vocabulary

Infer

Predict

Explain

Retrieve

Summarise

Independent Reading

We encourage all our children to read every day and to record their reading in their reading journals. This is monitored by the teacher each week and celebrated in our Friday assembly when children achieve a significant milestone e.g. 25 days. Children who read over 300 days in a year are taken to Waterstones and are presented with a brand new book for their efforts.

Throughout the year we also encourage children to love books through our Love Library events, library competitions, visiting authors and World Book day celebrations.

In each year group we have also developed a Recommended Reading list for the children to challenge themselves to read by the end of the year.