Reading

Reading Intent

At Alma Park, we value reading as a crucial life skill. By the time children leave us, they read confidently for meaning and regularly enjoy reading for pleasure.

Alma Park’s Reading curriculum begins in EYFS. This foundation in Reading is based on the Early Years Framework: Literacy, Communication and Language and Understanding of the World educational programmes. The National Curriculum provides the skill and knowledge progression foundations that are then built on to provide a purposeful progression of knowledge, skills and vocabulary. This ensures that the National Curriculum end points are met.

Our pupils are given a breadth of experience to develop their understanding of themselves as individuals, within their diverse community and also as members of a wider global community and as confident readers. Pupils build on their knowledge and skills in different areas of Reading, such as word reading and fluency, prosody and comprehension. This ensures they can read confidently to support learning across the entire curriculum. Pupils are taught to read fluently, understand extended prose and are encouraged to read for pleasure.

The Reading curriculum gives pupils life skills to enable them to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. By teaching Reading in discrete lessons and with purposeful links to other curriculum areas, pupils become confident, independent readers. 

At Alma Park, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. We start teaching phonics in Nursery/Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression (a systematic and synthetic phonics programme), which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. As a result, all our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read. At Alma Park, we also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum. We have a strong focus on language development for our children because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.

We encourage our children to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose. As a UNICEF Rights Respecting School, Reading is delivered in a safe and inspiring environment which nurtures children’s talents, allowing them to thrive so that when they leave Alma Park they are responsible, active citizens. Reading at Alma Park promotes and encourages sustainability in various ways including: links with wider curriculum areas and reading texts that support the environment such as Eco conscious books. Diversity is embraced through providing a wide range of reading material and texts that reflect our local community. Teaching materials are also adapted when necessary to ensure SEND and disadvantaged pupils can access all aspects of the same curriculum.

At Alma Park we are always looking for opportunities to develop our curriculum and this involves seeking enrichment activities for our pupils using local community links. E.g. Arcadia the local library, Salford Library service, book fairs, holiday reading challenges, literature festivals, visiting authors and parent workshops. 

Parents/Carers information about Little Wandle can be found here