In This Section
Reading
“From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover you have wings.”
Helen Hayes
We believe that the ability to effectively communicate is at the heart of the future success of every one of our pupils. The English curriculum at Stansfield Hall is designed to give pupils the tools they need to be able to engage with the world around them. Reading is a crucial part of our curriculum. All children from Foundation Stage to Year 6 are provided with many opportunities to develop and apply their reading skills across the curriculum. We follow the National Curriculum and the EYFS framework, and the texts used by The Literacy Tree are used to inspire our units. Children in EYFS and year 1 and 2 follow our phonics scheme to develop their reading. Children from year 2 to year 6 follow our ‘Literacy Tree’ units.
Our reading programme promotes a lifelong love of reading and ensures children have a good grounding in phonics before they graduate to our bespoke programme, which includes Read Write Inc and Accelerated Reader, two renowned approaches to developing primary aged readers.
The books we choose help children to grow ideas and expand their minds. We only choose significant and important children's literature to create our book-based resources. We grow literary knowledge through Literary Leaves. We provide a range of sequenced activities that take children through whole books to teach reading comprehension and create critical readers. Literary Leaves use novels, poetry collections and high-quality, non-fiction books that connect to the Writing Roots through Literary Themes.
We believe the exposure of children’s literature within the primary school setting is vital as a rich context for learning; not only within English as a subject but to support building a reading culture throughout the school. We aim to use high quality books that offer opportunities for empathy and can aid philosophical enquiry, as a means of developing the spoken language requirements through debate, drama and discussion using the issues raised through, and within, the text.
