Our Intent: 

At Sandal Castle Primary, it is our priority to ensure every child has the necessary skills they need to become successful, confident readers. We know that reading is the key to academic success. It helps children to access learning in all subjects, alongside the benefits that it can bring in later life. We use reading as the core of our curriculum, and we ensure children have exposure to books that reflect a diverse range of characters, cultures and backgrounds. We provide a rich reading diet consisting of a variety of authors and genres. Children will read for fluency, read for meaning and read for pleasure throughout the school day. 

Read and Respond

Throughout our school, from Years 3 to Year 6, children take part in a specific reading comprehension lesson every week. This lesson is based upon a text which has been chosen primarily because of the level of challenge it presents, either challenge through language, theme/issues or structure, for example.

A unit of work is planned around a text and weekly lessons are spent exploring a wider range of comprehension skills in depth rather than simply reading the chapter and retrieving basic information as a recap. Skills focussed around our Reading Gems (see below), such as summarising and predicting using evidence from the text, evaluating and analysing an author’s craft, making judgements about characters’ motivations and debating and examining key issues are just a selection of the vital comprehension experiences our children participate in weekly. The work produced in these lessons is recorded, which showcases the variety of developing reading thinking skills on offer.

A sample of our quality texts across the KS2 curriculum

Wider Reading Curriculum: 

Throughout the year, every class across KS2 visits our local library (Sandal Library), which allows our children the wonderful opportunity to develop themselves as a reader. During the Summer holidays, our children are invited to take part in the Summer Reading Challenge supported by our local library. 

In addition to this, we share and celebrate authors, illustrators, story tellers, poets in school on special days (such as World Book Day), but also through visits and visitors to Sandal Castle Primary. 

We believe that every child has the right to see themselves as a reader. It is our responsibility to get the right book in their hands. Our staff are reading role models who value reading and express their enjoyment of literature. Children are given the opportunity to talk about books, why we like them and recommend books to others, during our weekly Book Club and ERIC (Everyone reading in class).

We are currently developing our school library to widen our children's access to a wider range of genres and authors. Our school library will be at the heart of the school. It will be used by all classes. We will have a wide selection to choose from, including fiction, non-fiction, classics, short stories, poetry and graphic novels. We also have a quality stock of dyslexia-friendly books. In addition, we subscribe to 'First News', allowing every class within KS2 to receive a weekly newspaper to develop a thirst for current affairs and the world around them. 

All of the above allow our children to foster a love of reading by listening to and interacting with a variety of literature, non-fiction and poetry. This provides our children with the skills to read confidently, with a secure understanding. 

Our new Junior Leadership Team will have a Head of English. This person will work alongside their Reading Ambassadors to raise the value of reading across school. 

We are very proud of our community links, who support our reading journey. We have a fantastic body of Reading Friends who visit school on a weekly basis to share their experience and love of reading. 

Our Reading Gems: