We encourage children to develop a love of reading and books by providing rich reading environments in every classroom and in the school library. Staff read aloud, a wide range of good quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry, to children regularly. Word recognition skills are taught to enable children to decode texts as well as the skills needed to comprehend what they are reading. 

Reading Scheme/Programme – Our school uses a variety of different reading schemes to provide a wide variety of appropriate quality texts for children to read covering all genres. The schemes incorporated into our reading provision include: Oxford Reading Tree, Read Write INC and some of The Power of Reading recommended texts. Books are levelled in order to ensure progression and challenge for all children. We have a variety of books available for KS1 and KS2. 

Classic Texts – all children will have classic texts read to them in all year groups. This may include traditional fairy tales / rhymes in FS and KS1 to established classic novels in KS2. 

Reading Areas All classrooms have class reading areas with subject specific books and other age-appropriate reading for pleasure books. All classrooms have access to themed mental well-being books outside the classroom.

Reading across the curriculum- In accordance with Peters bookstore and our curriculum subject leaders, we are creating our very own Holy Cross reading spine that combines all the different genres of reading. 

Reading 

We aim for pupils to be able to: 

• Be skilled at word reading and comprehension. 

• Have a secure knowledge of phonics to assist with early reading. 

• Provide high-quality discussion to develop comprehension skills. 

• Read a wide range of fiction and non-fiction across the curriculum in order to encourage a love and an appreciation of reading. 

• Become fluent and confident readers allowing their skills to be transferred across any subject therefore enabling them to be secondary ready.

 

EYFS/KS1/ KS2 home reading-

All children in EYFS and Key stage one are given a weekly home reading book. Reading must be carried out every evening and recorded in the home reading records. We also use regular fluent reading checks to ensure that are pupils are developing into fluent, confident readers. 

In EYFS this is a specific levelled book from the Oxford reading tree scheme or an RWI book.

Year 1 and year 2 use fiction and non-fiction RWI books and ‘real books’ once all levels are achieved. Children are assessed regularly to ensure that their home reading books match their reading age and ability. This is to ensure children can read 90% of the book fluently. We use the RWI phonics assessment to ensure that children’s phonetic understanding /ability is matched to the accurate levelled book. Children take reading books home on a Friday and return on the following Thursday. Parents are requested to sign and comment home-reading diaries to show they have been supporting reading.

Whole class guided reading homework- Year 3 and 4
A short homework reading task will be set at the teacher’s discretion per week. Children will have a set amount of pages to read and a reading task to complete in their reading journals.

Year 5 and 6
In order to support the secondary transition, children will be given a set amount of reading per week and a reading task linked to this. Tasks will include a range of comprehension, summarising, prediction and inference work. 

Reading at home support/reading for pleasure

At Holy Cross Catholic Primary, we encourage children to develop their love and reading and to become confident and fluent readers. It is important that children are continuing this by reading often at home to build up their fluency and to enjoy the opportunity to read for pleasure. 

On this page, you will find links to websites where you can access free eBooks and audio books for children to read online.

There are also some top tips for how you can help your child with reading at home. 

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/find-a-book/library-page/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/stories

https://www.booktrust.org.uk/books-and-reading/have-some-fun/storybooks-and-games/

We have also included some Storytime Online documents- scan the QR code and away you go!

Holy Cross Story time

At Holy Cross, story time is one of our favourite times in the school day. We want all children to continue enjoying stories at home and therefore we dedicate time at the end of every day to sit back, relax and listen to a story.