At St Andrew's we encourage a love of Reading in many different ways and firmly believe that reading for pleasure and reading to gain information are life long skills.

If you come into school you may see:

• classroom door displays showing what books are currently being read in class
• author focus displays celebrating a range of different authors
• class book corners with a range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry books
• books borrowed from the school library service supporting learning in our topic areas
• children sharing books with our community Bookworm volunteers
• children sharing books individually or in a group or as a whole class
• a special selection of 50 books which have been recommended for each year group

How Reading is taught

We begin to teach reading by sharing wordless books to encourage talk and understanding of how a book works. We then match books to children's phonic knowledge so all books contain words children can decode. This encourages fluency and confidence so children believe that they can read. Alongside this, reading sessions teach children how to read with expression and to read for meaning. Children take home a book they can confidently read to share with parents and carers. They also choose a sharing book which may be narrative to be read to them or an information book to look at together. As children's confidence grows and they become fluent in reading, they select books of their choice in discussion with an adult to ensure they are reading a range of suitable and enjoyable books. The focus of teaching now moves more to understanding and analysing what is being read. Guided Reading lessons are focussed on the following key skills:

Predict - guess what might happen linked to what you already know 

Retrieve - locate information that is already known, use skimming and scanning skills to retrieve certain words.

Author Techniques - comment on the author’s intentions, vocabulary choices, layout, sentence structure and figurative language. 

Infer -  obtain information which is not readily available in the text, read the clues and make suitable suggestions.

Summarise or Sequence - create a short summary of what has happened so far, include all the main events, put events in chronological order.

Explain and Question - explain HOW you know things linked to evidence in the text, give your opinion and interpretation, ask questions / rhetorical questions to the author

Although a wide range of books and authors will be looked at and discussed throughout each year, every class has 3 focus authors. Children will learn about the past or current lives of these authors and be familiar with some of the books they have written.