At Beecroft Academy, we respect each pupil as an individual reader and adapt our curriculum and provision to meets the needs of each pupil in their reading journey. Reading is at the heart of our curriculum and we aim to create a life-long love of reading, promoting a sense of wonder and interest in books for both pleasure and learning. We aim to nurture positive reading habits for pleasure from the early stages of reading and throughout school, giving every pupil the confidence and skills to reach their personal reading potential and ‘Achieve Excellence Together’. Reading improves language and vocabulary and inspires our imagination and allows everyone the opportunity to develop and foster new interests.

Our curriculum is intentionally designed to teach pupils the key skills in the early stages of reading using the phonics programme ‘Essential Letters and Sounds’ which develops their ability to segment and blend and develop an instant recognition of the harder to spell and read words. The pupils will then increase their fluency and confidence in reading and are ready to then move on to developing other key areas of reading skills. At Beecroft Academy, pupils encounter regular and varied occasions to read, from independent reading, shared reading, one to one reading with an adult or reading in groups. Reading skills are taught using VIPERS as a tool to support pupils with their development of vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval or summarisation. Each reading lesson will focus on a range of these skills.

All pupils, regardless of their ability, will have access to a wide range of good quality and current reading materials and books in order to inspire them. We aim to provide reading material which reflects our diverse and inclusive community. Weaved through our reading
curriculum we provide opportunities for the pupils to explore ‘The Big Ideas’ of significance, growth, change, democracy and investigation. Throughout their reading education, thepupils will encounter a range of different genres to understand language and extend theirunderstanding of vocabulary across all areas of the curriculum.

‘Echo reading’ is used throughout the school an across the curriculum to model prosody andreading fluency including intonation and expression. Every reader will be taught a number of strategies and skills to enable them to move towards being a confident independent reader. These skills provide our readers the ability to comprehend what they are reading. We also encourage them to be reflective readers when reading and consider the author’s choice of vocabulary in relation to the reader.