Reading

“Your word is a lamp to guide me and a light for my path.”– Luke 11:28

Reading helps us grow in wisdom, guiding our thoughts and helping us understand God’s truth.

At St Bernadette Primary School, our Reading curriculum aims to develop confident, fluent and engaged readers for life. We promote a strong culture of reading for pleasure, using high-quality texts, class novels and story time to build vocabulary, comprehension, emotional understanding and a shared love of reading across the school. Regular opportunities for discussion and enjoyment of texts help pupils develop a deeper connection with reading and with one another.

Reading is taught systematically through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds from EYFS to Year 2, supporting pupils to develop secure phonics knowledge and early reading skills. From Year 2 onwards, pupils take part in regular guided reading sessions that are carefully tailored to the needs of the class, with a continued focus on decoding alongside the development of comprehension skills, including retrieval, inference and prediction.

Reading is promoted and supported through end-of-day class novels, parent volunteer readers, whole-class reading experiences and structured guided reading sessions, and is also embedded across all areas of the curriculum to reinforce its importance as a key life skill. 

Reading is also promoted beyond the classroom through a whole-school reading challenge, parental engagement activities, story sessions, book fairs and author visits, encouraging a shared love of reading between home and school.

Rooted in Catholic Social Teaching, our Reading curriculum promotes dignity, curiosity and a love of learning by encouraging pupils to explore diverse voices, reflect on different experiences and develop empathy and understanding of the wider world.

By the end of Key Stage 2, pupils are fluent, confident readers who can understand a wide range of texts, discuss their ideas thoughtfully and read for both purpose and pleasure.