“It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations—something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own.” —Katherine Patterson

At St. James’ Primary School, we value reading as a key life skill and are dedicated to enabling our children to become lifelong lovers of reading. We believe that reading can enable our children to learn key skills that will be applied throughout their lives as well as giving them an opportunity to escape to other worlds within their own imagination. At St. James’, we strive to embed a culture of reading into the core of everything we do, providing opportunities for children to read both independently and aloud as well as allowing them the chance to discuss and recommend books they have read to or with their peers.

In order to create lifelong lovers of reading, we continuously have reading at the heart of everything we do.  We believe that if a child can become a confident, independent reader then this will allow them to access texts for any subject within our curriculum as well as applying this in the future.

We believe that every child is entitled to have the opportunity to read and enjoy doing so. In a society where screen time is growing, we believe that is our responsibility to help show the children the magic of reading and to instil a love of reading for pleasure.  In order to enable this, we allow our children to be given opportunities to select texts from class libraries and our school library. Adults and peers help children to select pleasure books to read if they are struggling to choose on their own, as well as books being presented as great texts to read. Through Book Fairs and donations, we raise money to keep our school books current and appealing to our children. In KS1 our children are listened to whilst reading throughout each week by staff and volunteers. We regularly seek volunteers to hear our KS2 children read. Children who are assessed below ARE in their reading in KS2 have specific reading and phonic interventions.

In Early Year and KS1 the focused guided reading groups follow the RWI phonic scheme. When children finish the RWI scheme they participate in whole class guided reading following the same format as in KS2 in order to embed previous skills and build upon new ones.

Guided reading lessons in KS2 at St James’s are planned to develop children to become fluent and confident readers. Rich fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts are used to aid in children developing their comprehension skills with specific focus on vocabulary, retrial, inference, explanation, prediction, sequence and summarize. The children will have to opportunity to take part in rich discussions and develop their reading skills through echo, shared, choral, paired and independent reads.