St Margaret's Reading Spine

Through our core reading spine, children are exposed to high quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry. These texts underpin our writing curriculum and are intended to develop learners with a love of books.

Guided Reading

In Key Stage 1, our early reading instruction focuses primarily on decoding in Y1. Through our daily Supersonic Phonic Friends teaching, we aim to ensure that our learners leave Year 1 being able to confidently decode. Alongside this, story time sessions that include book talk aim to support early comprehension and comprehension strategies. Led by the teacher, these sessions aim to lay the foundations of key skills such as retrieval, prediction, inference, understanding vocabulary and summarising/ reflecting on reading.

In Y2, more formalised guided reading sessions take place. As children's decoding and comprehension skills can vary during these early stages of learning, small-group guided reading teaching takes place in Year 2 on a carousel. The guided reading carousel will typically include:

• A pre-read or phonics focused session
• A teacher-led guided reading session
• An independent follow up activity 
• A reading for pleasure session

Guided reading texts are carefully selected by the class teacher to ensure that books are decodable, ensuring children are able to focus on their reading fluency and comprehension skills, unburdened by gaps in phonic knowledge. Reading fluency is modelled in weekly sessions using echo and choral reading strategies, underpinned by John Murray's 6Ps of fluency.

In Key Stage 2, we teach guided reading using a whole-class approach. This approach is intended to ensure that all children engage with age-appropriate texts and make good progress through their reading programme of study. We use the John Murray guided reading approach, which allows children to revisit a text multiple times over the course of a week. During this week, children follow a set learning structure which includes text orientation, vocabulary study, reading fluency development, text-talk and reading comprehension skills. 

Following this approach, children will study a range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, engaging with high quality texts and extracts from John Murray's Reading Explorers spine.

Reading for Pleasure

Reading for pleasure is prioritised at St Margaret's in the following ways:

• Class story time takes place daily in all classrooms
• Our school library is well-stocked and updated regularly
• Staff recommend books to children to support them in finding authors and genres that they love to read
• In KS1, alongside their decodable reading books, 'home sharing' books also provide opportunities for children to develop a love of books
• In KS2, children are given opportunities to select their own home reading books
• Whole-school book fairs allow children the opportunity to engage with books beyond the school library
• Planned author and poet visits to school raise the profile of reading at various points throughout the year
• Engagement with global and national initiatives such as World Book Day and National Poetry Day
• Cozy class reading areas and curated book stocks are part of every classroom