We want children to develop a life-long love of reading and we are committed to developing children as confident and fluent readers. It is so important that children learn to read fluently as quickly as possible so that they can gain knowledge for themselves.

Skilled word reading is taught from an early age through speedy decoding and recognition of printed words.

But learning to read is about listening and understanding, as well as working out what is printed on the page. Through hearing stories, children are exposed to a wide range of words. This helps them build their own vocabulary and improve their understanding which is vital as they start to read. Throughout the school, staff develop a love of reading through reading aloud and telling stories and rhymes.

We teach reading using a variety of reading schemes, ‘book bands’ and carefully chosen, high-quality, whole-class texts to ensure that our children have access to a wealth of reading material that motivates them to want to read. Comprehension skills are developed through reading and discussing these high-quality texts which include stories, poems and non-fiction. We explicitly teach reading skills such as predicting, comparing, retrieving, inferring, summarizing, skimming and scanning and provide opportunities for children to practise these skills across the curriculum.

For those children who need additional support, we have various targeted interventions: booster groups, volunteer readers and a program of peer reading.

We encourage all children to read widely across a range of genres. We place great importance on home reading and have a home-school reading system from Nursery to Year 6. Children read books at the appropriate level for them; this is either from a ‘book band’ or as a free reader. Children are encouraged to read each day at home. Children in the Foundation Stage and KS1 have a reading record book for them to complete with their parents. Children in KS2 compile book reviews each half term and present them to the class, summarizing and analyzing the book. We encourage all parents to engage in the daily reading routine with their children and to talk about the books they read.

As children complete their phonic development and become free readers, the Reading lessons at Bousfield (in Y3-6) put greater emphasis on experiencing whole texts - novels, non-fiction texts, poetry and picture books. Lessons explore language, images, events and themes in depth - through drama, discussion, drawing and written response. They explicitly develop comprehension skills in information retrieval, the ability to deduce the meaning of words in context, the ability to make simple and complex inferences and the ability to summarise texts, amongst others. Through this process, we ensure that all children leave Bousfield with a literary repertoire of whole texts, which they can discuss with and recommend to others, and use in their future reading and learning experiences. 

Children who enter Bousfield in older age groups at an earlier stage of language development are assessed to enable appropriate provisions to be made for them and to ensure that the books they read in school and at home are appropriate and enjoyable for them.

Throughout the school, children make their own books linked to different areas of the curriculum. Children also showcase their learning of a poem, story or non-fiction text in class assemblies. The Roving Book Shop visits the school annually and children are invited to take part in the annual summer reading challenge hosted by the local library.

For parents:

We have created some video presentations covering phonics and reading which may be helpful to you in supporting your child:

Add Videos: Reading Workshop/EYFS, Year 1 Phonics Screening, Year 2 Phonics screening.