Reading
At Foulds, we believe that the teaching of reading is integral to a child’s understanding and appreciation of the world around them. It gives our children a platform to reach beyond what they already know, to share and participate fully in diverse and cultural experiences and develop the vocabulary they need to express themselves effectively. It will equip them for the challenges they will face in the wider world. Reading is at the heart of our curriculum and we recognise it as the key to unlocking the wonders of the rest of our knowledge-rich curriculum, keeping our children highly engaged and continually developing.
At Foulds, we recognise the golden threads of the effective teaching of reading are:
- A consistent, systematic synthetic phonics programme, taught progressively from Early Years to Year Two.
- Frequent, engaging and meaningful talk and dialogue surrounding a wide variety of high-quality, diverse texts and genres (as well as across the wider curriculum subjects and school day), that all children have the skill and confidence to contribute to.
- Accurate assessment of children’s reading ability, both formally and summatively (termly), to understand the difficulties and implement the necessary support , to allow all pupils to keep up with their peers.
- Building a love of stories and of reading stemmed through a culture of curiosity.
- Creating a strong home-school partnership in which modelling and advice and support is offered to all parents and carers to enable and enrich our children’s reading opportunities.
These factors focus on giving all children both the decoding skills and language skills needed to develop fluent, enthusiastic and critical readers.
We aim to bring reading to life and give it purpose using music, drama and performance, both within the classroom and beyond. Our curriculum is enriched with performances of focus texts (for example the Young Shakespeare Company, and Julia Donaldson in theatre and orchestra), local library visits, internal and community reading and book events to inspire a school-wide love of reading.