Curriculum Intent for reading

At Halifax Primary School, we have a vision that says, ‘Helping each other to aim high’. As part of this, we ensure we are developing pupils’ reading skills to provide them with an essential life skill, whilst promoting reading as a pleasurable and enjoyable past time. In connection with our values: we are aspirational for them to experience a range of different and engaging texts through our reading curriculum and exposure to a variety of texts in our school libraries for our pupils’ independent reading. We nurture them by teaching them the skills of reading as they move through the school and encourage them to support each other through discussion. Pupils are supported to collaborate by discussing a text, providing book recommendations, and working together to develop their reading fluency. Finally, we encourage curiosity through the texts chosen for our core and supplementary reading spine and providing opportunities in all areas of the curriculum to answer both their own and others’ questions.
 

We know that reading is a fundamental life skill. English develops children’s ability to listen, speak, read, and write for a wide range of purposes. Children are empowered to become enthusiastic and critical readers of stories, poetry and non-fiction and informative texts. It is our intention to ensure that all pupils read widely, read with confidence, read with fluency, and show comprehension of texts appropriate to their age. Key to success will be ensuring constant opportunities for discussion where pupils can develop their understanding of vocabulary, and make supported judgements, thoughts and share opinions of a text.

Our Key principles are as follows:
- Halifax children develop enthusiastic and reflective readers, through contact with a range of challenging and substantial texts.
- Halifax children become confident and independent readers, through an appropriate focus on phonics, word, sentence and text-level knowledge.
- Halifax children are provided with a language-rich environment that promotes a culture of reading and writing.
- Halifax children develop an interest in, and a love of literature, that will not only support their learning across the curriculum but also enrich their lives.
- Halifax children value and use books as a basis for learning, pleasure, talk and play, whilst valuing and celebrating diversity in culture and language. 

Curriculum Map

Impact – What our pupils say about learning to read at Halifax:

In all subjects at Halifax, we have Quality of Education reviews where our pupils share their learning and experiences in different subjects. Below is a small sample of what our Halifax pupils think about their reading lessons:

Isabella from Year 4 said, “I like reading to find out more information. I want to be a veterinarian and I need to use books to find out more about animals.”

Kendall from Year 5, “I like the reading books with different themes, for example the ‘Boy in the Tower’ is mysterious and our teacher pauses each time we’re about to uncover a mystery and we get excited to uncover what it is.”
Debora from Year 3 said, “I’m really happy as I’ve moved from 2.7 to 3.8 and now, I can read the Tom Gates books.”
Louis from Year 4 said, “I like reading more and getting more knowledge on the Ancient Egyptians.”
Max from Year 4 said, “My favourite book is Beast Quest. That’s the book I got for achieving five Friday Book Cards.