Our Reading Spine Rationale:
At The Royal School we teach children both how to learn to read and to read to learn. Learning to read focuses primarily on the phonics skills of the children and being able to decode and blend sounds to read. This also includes alien words and high frequency words. Reading to Learn focuses primarily upon the reciprocal reading skills children require to read for pleasure and to develop subject knowledge. These reciprocal reading skills are taught explicitly in our daily reading lessons, individually, in groups or whole class. We plan our English lessons around high-quality core texts, which also link to the topics and themes for that term.
We have ensured our selected texts represent a wide range of diversity in both authors and characters and are engaging to encourage a love of reading. A diet of fiction and non-fiction is promoted within our Reading Spine.
We have researched different reading spine templates and have based our book selections on recommendations from Pie Corbett, the Book Trust and Books for Topics as well as from the teacher’s own knowledge and understanding of the children and the curriculum.
At The Royal School, we continue to focus on making links across the curriculum and to each year group’s key concepts.
Foundation Stage
We understand that the children in Reception thrive on repetition and by listening to stories again and again. Through re-reading stories to children, teachers can deepen their familiarity with a story and increase their emotional engagement. Re-reading allows children to hear new vocabulary over again and helps them to develop a basic understanding of how narratives develop. The children will be given the opportunity to connect with characters and their feelings, and to relive the excitement and emotion of stories.