Our approach to READING

We are Authors (as readers)

At Parson Street we believe that reading is an essential life skill and we are committed to enabling our children to become lifelong readers.

At the heart of our strategy is our drive to foster a love of reading, enriching children’s learning through a carefully  designed teaching curriculum that exposes our children to a wide range of genres and utilises thought-provoking, high-quality texts.

Reading is a skill that enables children to develop their learning across the wider curriculum and lays the foundations for future success. We recognise the importance of taking a consistent, whole-school approach to the teaching of reading in order to embed reading skills and identify and close any gaps.

Children will learn to select texts for enjoyment and as a vehicle to drive their own knowledge and understanding. They will develop the skills to comprehend, draw inferences, analyse, evaluate and assess the reliability of different texts. 

We have high expectations of all children and we encourage children to challenge themselves, persevere and pursue success.

‘Language opens doors. It unlocks the world of reading and the imagination, the excitement of writing, the capacity to explore new subjects and releases our potential to learn and grow as an individual. In schools, it underpins progress, impacts on attainment throughout primary and secondary years, affects self-esteem and behaviour and plays a huge role in a child’s future life chances. Without enough language – a word gap – a child is seriously limited in their enjoyment of school and success beyond.’ – Jane Harley (Oxford University Press)

Our aims:

We aim to provide children with a literacy-rich environment, high quality texts and inspiring learning opportunities, which will help them to:

• Gain a life-long enjoyment of reading and books.
• Read accurately, fluently and with understanding;
• Apply a knowledge of structured synthetic phonics in order to decode unfamiliar words with increasing accuracy and speed;
• Be able to read with expression, clarity and confidence;
• Develop a good linguistic knowledge of vocabulary and grammar;
• Read and respond to a wide range of different types of texts;
• Develop a deeper level of emotional intelligence and empathy;
• Read fluently, and with confidence, in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education.
• Develop a range of higher-order reading skills in order to understand, analyse and evaluate a range of texts.