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At The Chiltern School reading is a strong focus across our school community and we have embedded a reading curriculum that is representative of and appropriate to our children’s learning needs at each stage of their journey. We believe all pupils should have the opportunity to develop necessary reading skills, whilst promoting and nurturing a love of reading.
Reading is the gateway to the wider curriculum areas and a key life skill that will support our young peoples’ communication, understanding and independence. Our reading curriculum encourages our pupils to develop a wealth of functional reading skills with a focus on different developmental areas, depending on the curriculum reading stage they access.
Reading Curriculum
The Chiltern School reading curriculum is separated into two stages, each offering the teaching and learning of key reading skills.
Stage 1 is our Pre phonics reading curriculum where pupils will access a plethora of learning experiences that focus on developing phonological awareness. This supports our pupils’ knowledge of sound discrimination and their listening skills. This stage of our curriculum is centred around sounds, not letters and is spoken, not written.
Pupils will be supported to develop their phonological awareness through seven ‘Aspects of Learning’ that nurture our pupils’ understanding of general sound discrimination in the early stages. Through the later aspects, pupils move on to discrimination of voice sounds and oral blending skills. Stage 1 of our reading curriculum is for pupils within our Explore curriculum pathways and some Evolve curriculum pupils.
Read Write Inc
Stage 2 of our reading curriculum is our more formal approach to teaching reading where pupils are able to orally blend sounds so are ready to be introduced to words through text. We follow the Read Write Inc phonics programme, though this is adapted as necessary to ensure we are meeting the individual needs of our pupils and incorporating our schools pedagogical approaches. Pupils accessing Read Write Inc teaching will be introduced to the English letter sounds (phonemes), the letters that represent them (graphemes) and learn how to apply these to word reading through segmenting and blending. Pupils will also develop letter formation and spelling skills for writing. Stage 2 of our reading curriculum is for our Evolve and Establish curriculum pupils.
Following completion of the Read Write Inc programme, pupils will progress onto comprehension based reading teaching where they will further fine tune their understanding of text and their ability to interpret text to construct meaning in a functional way. This stage is embedding reading as a necessary life skill to support our young people’s progression into adulthood and hopefully a lifelong love of reading.
Reading Environment
Each classroom is reading rich at The Chiltern School and every classroom is equipped with a reading area that is a designated space for pupils to enjoy books/ reading activities through their own interests. Our learning environments across the school are full of opportunities for pupils to experience reading activities linked to the stage 1 and 2 curriculum intents as part of organic, continuous provision. Pupils are exposed to stories, songs and rhymes etc daily in all curriculum pathways, supporting the development of language, communication and reading skills. They also have access to an online audio reading programme.
We have a large collection of books in our reading library resource area including comprehension focused texts, phonics leveled books and a range of sensory stories for pupils to access.
Reading Culture
Pupils working within Stage 2 of our reading curriculum have the opportunity to take a RWI phonics book home each week to continue their learning and extend the reading culture into their home environments. This is not a necessity and is discussed on an individual pupil basis so that we are able to continue promoting a love of reading and a positive reading culture amongst our pupils.
Whole School Events
The Chiltern School celebrates reading throughout the year and on World Book Day pupils and staff across the school join in with numerous reading focused activities and challenges that take place across the school. Last year included a whole school ‘readathon’ where each class went live online to share a book/ sensory/ character/ role play/ text themed activity and a treasure hunt across the school. Pupils and staff are invited to dress up as their favourite book themed characters and all classes celebrate with different themed book activities and play on this day.
Library Reading
We have a good relationship with our local library where Evolve and Establish classes visit at least twice a year. Pupils have the opportunity to transfer their reading skills to a new community environment where they can nourish a love of reading even further and find texts of their own interests, in many different formats through magazines, newspapers, books, poems, technology. The librarian also reads a book aloud to the whole class group.
Parent Workshops
The Chiltern School hosts parent workshops throughout the year to dive deeper into our reading curriculum! This supports us to work in partnership with our parents, creating a shared understanding of each reading stage. Parents gain a thorough insight into the skills they are learning, how they are relevant to reading and how to continue to foster these skills in other environments outside of the classroom.
For further information and a more detailed explanation of our reading curriculum at The Chiltern School, please see our Reading guide.