First and foremost, our aim is for all children at Woodvale to develop a life-long love of reading. We passionately believe in the importance of exposing our children to the wonders of the written word. Reading is truly a tool for life, and it is through books and our language-rich classrooms that we teach the essential reading skills that our children will need to thrive in their own lives.  

Our children are entitled to a reading curriculum that enables them to: 

• Develop a life-long love of reading 
• Confidently read a wide range of texts with appropriate pronunciation, fluency and expression 
• Appreciate the purpose and value of books and story-telling 
• Gain knowledge of the world 
• Apply their reading skills to the wider curriculum 
• Support and develop their writing skills 
• Be prepared for the opportunities and demands of Secondary Education. 

We use Talk for Reading as a comprehensive framework around which we immerse children in books and teach them the key reading skills we know they need to become confident readers. To achieve this, from Nursery to Year 6, children experience a range of diverse characters, settings and themes through carefully chosen texts.

The value of talk 

To support our children’s writing skills, talk is encouraged, practised, refined and improved. Our teachers are excellent reading, speaking and listening role models who regularly read aloud a wide variety of texts, bringing each text to life. Our children are expected to speak and read aloud with accuracy, clear projection and appropriate intonation to engage and entertain their audience. 

Progression of skills 

The long-term progression of reading skills learned, both within and across year groups, is set out in our whole school ‘Progression of Skills’ document. The planning and delivery of each text is then recorded on our ‘Teaching and Learning Sequence’ document where discrete lessons are logically sequenced. 

Reading VIPERS 

Our reading curriculum ensures all National Curriculum skills are taught. We use the Reading VIPERS acronym in KS2 (Vocabulary, Infer, Predict, Explain, Retrieve and Sequence/Summarise) to help teach each reading domain explicitly and repetitively to ensure our children understand, and are therefore able to apply, each of these. 

Individual reading books 

At Woodvale Primary Academy we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Early Years and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. 

In Key Stage 2, our children are assessed using our Accelerated Reader programme using an online ‘STAR Reading’ test. These tests are used to track their reading progress. Pupils then read a book from their appropriate reading level from our well-resourced KS2 Library before taking an online quiz about that book; this is designed to assess their comprehension of the text and inferential meanings within it. Year group reading winners, who have read the most words cumulatively through the year, are announced and celebrated during our weekly Celebration Assembly. 

Reading and the wider curriculum 

To support children's learning and provide further opportunity, reading is incorporated into foundation subjects. We provide book boxes to support learning in these subjects and our children are encouraged to read and investigate these texts to further deepen their knowledge and understanding.