Reading

Reading at Hartwell:

Reading is at the heart of our curriculum. We encourage children to develop a positive attitude towards all kind of literature and believe that parents play a vital role in this process. We are a school that is passionate about books and reading. Last year alone we read 52,000,000 words, which is fantastic and our love of books just keeps growing. In fact, we aim for all of our children to be life-long bookworms who access books to: find out information, relax and learn about the world around them.

We want the children in our school to:

Enjoy reading all genre of books and appreciate the value and worth of reading in everyday life.
Read a range of different kinds of reading material fluently and with understanding
Make choices about the sorts of texts that they enjoy
Use reading skills to search for information
Use a full range of reading cues (e.g. phonics, grammar and context)
Read ‘between the lines’ and behind the images
Be exposed to literature that is beyond their current experience and fluency.

Throughout the school day, children are provided with many opportunities to develop and strengthen their literacy skills. These include:

Daily phonics sessions in Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1
Daily supported reading sessions in Year 1
A focused reading programme in KS2 which allows for discussion, analysis and written responses to text
Focus texts used in literacy lessons
Home reading books and a reading diary to record in
A class novel or story book.
Opportunities to role play and act out fictional scenes

Where it has been identified that children need additional support to meet age related expectations, the school offer a range of intervention support strategies including:

‘Inference Training’- designed to support those who decode well but need support to comprehend texts
Switch On- designed to support those who find decoding words difficult.
Additional 1:1 reading with an adult or volunteer

We use Accelerated Reader at Hartwell for some children in KS2 (and some in Year 2 also) as a vehicle to assess and encourage readers. After finishing a book, the children take part in a short quiz, which gives them a word count that the children feverishly add to their total, which is readily celebrated in class.

In KS1, children read from a range of texts that complement the phonics that they are working on during morning phonics sessions and enable them to develop confidence and accuracy with their use. If children find reading challenging, we have a range of interventions that are designed to boost both their phonics knowledge and reading comprehension.

Our Library:

Our library is the hub of the school and is always full of children of all ages searching for books or treasuring books whilst snuggled on beanbags. Our library is stocked full of books that reflect a range of cultures and genres that reflect our exciting and vibrant world.

We have a valuable group of KS2 Library Guardians who dedicatedly applied for the post and were selected based on their passion for books. Our Library Guardians work hard to :