English

Reading

“I do believe something magical can happen when you read a good book.” – J.K. Rowling

The children at Wormholt Park are willing and enthusiastic readers, and our intent is to inspire a love of reading through exposing children to a variety of rich and inspiring literature.

Our hope is to instil a habit of reading widely and often, for pleasure and purpose.

We pride ourselves on being a reading school by ensuring that reading is an integral part of our daily life at school. Our class reading areas provide a rich assortment of texts to enrapture our children’s imagination, and further embed a love of reading.

Each classroom is a reading rich environment, immersing children in a variety of literature – helping us to produce motivated and confident readers, who read with accuracy and fluency, showing a secure comprehension of what they are reading.

The design of our school curriculum has reading at its core – underpinned by high quality texts. Through our curriculum, we provide children with the opportunities and experiences that they need to develop the essential knowledge and cultural capital to become well-rounded, informed global citizens. This includes our SEND and EAL children, whose needs are closely monitored, and supported by specialist members of staff.

Our Guided Reading sessions expose children to a wide range of quality texts and question types. Children take part in carousel Guided Reading sessions throughout the week, using different reading activities to support spelling, punctuation and grammar along with key reading skills such as vocabulary, inference, predictions, explanations, retrieval and summarising (VIPERS). 

During daily Story Time, all teachers enthusiastically read to the children in their classes – giving the children exposure to high quality texts, delivered fluently.

We believe that it is important to give children access to reading materials from a broad spectrum that includes classics and contemporary texts.

As a school, we enthusiastically participate in any opportunity to celebrate reading. A highlight of our year is World Book Day where children celebrate an international love of reading. Children also make daily use of their reading records, which allow for a valuable platform for communication between parents, carers and teachers about what a child is reading and how to support them at home.

Reading achievements are celebrated through termly reading awards. Children who have been keen reading ambassadors throughout the course of the term are rewarded with a certificate and a book to take home. Our assemblies have been very successful opportunities to promote a love of reading, with children enjoying visits from famous authors, and participating in workshops.

Writing

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you” – Beatrix Potter

At Wormholt Park, the intent of our curriculum is to provide opportunities to develop a love of writing and to provide a wide variety of experiences for writing – both formally and informally, with an awareness of audience and purpose.

Through our curriculum, children are exposed to a wide variety of inspiring texts. Thus furthering their understanding of different literary devices and writing styles, which allows for opportunities to increase vocabulary and fluency to develop as authors of their own writing.

Writing is planned in the form of teaching sequences, supported by high quality texts and mixed media as stimuli.  Children are given opportunity to demonstrate their speaking and listening skills, through role-play and various other means of communication.  It is ambitious and progressive across year groups. Teachers have access to high quality texts, which support the development of relevant vocabulary and features of writing.

A key priority at Wormholt Park is to have regular parent information sessions and workshops whereby we focus on phonics, reading and SATs support for parents and carers. This provides them with age-related information, required to support the child’s academic development.