Here at St Mary's, we value reading as the doorway to creativity, visualisation and greater knowledge; it is the gateway to awesome, impossible realms, planets and worlds. Reading is a skill that enables children to develop their learning across the wider curriculum and lays the foundations for future success. Research tells us that children who read for pleasure on a daily basis develop a wider vocabulary, greater general knowledge and a far better understanding of other cultures. It is perhaps one of the single most important factors in a child’s development. Naturally, we therefore believe that it is every child’s right to learn to read, but we hope that our children go far beyond this and so we are committed to enabling our children to become lifelong readers. We have high expectations of all of our children's reading and we encourage them to challenge themselves, persevere and pursue success, ensuring that they ‘believe in better’ so that they can 'be more awesome'. 

As we strongly believe that learning to read should be a right for all children regardless of their circumstances, our intention is that ALL children attending our school will learn to read. What this looks like for children, in terms of their learning journey and success measures, may differ depending on their level of educational needs, but we pledge that every child will leave our school being able to read and understand a text independently.

We ensure that our intended outcomes are achieved through a variety of carefully considered environmental and pedagogical strategies, backed with an established reading culture which promotes the engagement with texts whilst normalising a love of reading.

Through daily Read Write Inc. Phonics lessons, children learn the foundations of reading and begin to develop into increasingly more fluent readers so that they become abler to focus on developing their skills in comprehension and vocabulary. Whilst on these programmes, the children explore cumulatively progressive books which match to the sounds/words they are learning and already know. Throughout this stage, reading comprehension skills are introduced through high-challenge, low-threat discussions around the texts as well as adults heavily modelling comprehension skills when reading aloud to their classes. 

The next step in the children's reading journey at St Mary's is whole-class guided reading utilising the Literacy Leaf programme where classes begin to explore two longer texts per half term. The children begin to explore more challenging vocabulary whilst also developing their awareness and understanding of the reading comprehension 'VIPERS'. 

V - Vocabulary

I - Inference

P - Prediction

E - Explanation

R - Recall

S - Sequence/Summary

The 'VIPERS' form the basis of the children's reading journey from then onwards. Every daily session focusses on one or more of the 'VIPERS' and, over time, children become highly skilled in identifying the VIPERS in questions, using skills linked to specific VIPERS and answering in an effective and informed manner.

Writing is a powerful means of communication which builds on the spoken word. This vital skill is necessary to allow pupils to function, engage and contribute within our society.

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Our aims in teaching writing are to equip pupils with a strong command of spoken and written language, and to develop a love of literature. Across the school, we ensure that there is a good coverage of genres, which are progressive across year groups.

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At St Ives Primary, we want writing to be linked to real experiences, so from the youngest of years groups we expose the children to real life experiences and hooks to give a purpose and focus for their writing. In Key Stage One, we teach writing alongside the Read Write Inc scheme and carry out a “Big Write” towards the end of the week to ensure that the children are given opportunities to write at length and in a less prescribed way. Throughout the whole school, we also use our themes to demonstrate their writing skills in other areas of the curriculum. 

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In Key Stage Two, the children follow CPLE’s “Power of Reading” scheme which is a book centred programme that puts high quality literature at the heart of the process to develop vocabulary, reading and writing skills as well as spark interest and curiosity. Children are also given the opportunities to write for real purposes and audiences. Moreover, our pupils have opportunities to apply and showcase their writing skills across other areas of the curriculum.