Reading at Severnbanks: Our Vision

Here at Severnbanks, we pride ourselves on being a school committed to developing competent readers with a love for reading; this runs right through our school community, from the children, to the parents and all members of our school staff team. We recognise how important it is to develop a passion for reading in our children, to enable them to be successful learners in all areas of the curriculum and in life beyond our school. We want all children to develop a love of reading whilst at Severnbanks Primary School.

Learning to read is about listening and understanding as well as working out what is printed on a page. We believe in the importance of children being read to; through hearing stories, children are exposed to a wide range of words. All classes have key texts that are read to them which link in with their terms focus which exposes children to language and classic stories which they may find too challenging to read independently. We are part of the Reading Teachers = Reading Pupils project through Cheltenham Literary Festival where new books are introduced to staff.

Cracking Comprehension and Tony Whatmuff strategies for reading comprehension is  supplemented with VIPERS at KS2 and Guided Reading at KS1 focus on the skills of comprehension, through identifying new vocabulary, to understanding the meaning of the written text and making links into existing knowledge and other texts.

Teachers share a variety of written material regularly with the children, fiction and non-fiction, stories, reports, diaries and poems; but not forgetting the importance that picture books can play.

We have a home-school reading system, which requests that children read a book at the appropriate level for them. In EYFS and Key Stage 1, children read books matched to their phonic phase in order to read and sounds that they have been taught. This then progresses to include tricky, high frequency and common exception words so that children are exposed to reading patterns, repetition and sight reading giving them a thorough grounding in fundamental reading skills. At KS2 children Project X provides a structured reading scheme and then children follow ‘book bandings’ ensuring they are making progress.

Alongside this, we visit the Cheltenham Literary Festival to attend author workshops, have visiting authors, poets, theatres, visiting books fairs and celebrate Roald Dahl Day and World Book Day.

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 Chosen text 24 /25 ( subject to change) 

Year group / Term	Autumn 1	Autumn 2	Spring 1	Spring 2	Summer 1	Summer 2
Starlets	Nursery Rhyme focus   We’re going on a bear hunt	Goldilocks and the three bears   Polar Bear, Polar Bear	Dear Zoo   Handa’s Noisy Night	Oliver’s Vegetables   The Very Hungry Caterpillar	Maisy goes on a plane   A duck in a truck	Sandcastle   Sharing a Shell
EYFS	Nursery Rhyme focus   Farmer Duck	Owl Babies Stick Man	Handa’s Surprise    Anansi the spider	Jack and the Beanstalk   Mr Wolf’s pancakes	The Train Ride    Whatever Next	Lucy and Tom at the Seaside   Rainbow Fish
Year 1	I love my dinosaur   Dear Dinosaur   Dinosaur poetry	Mrs. Armitage on Wheels The Most Magnificent Things	Non fiction- Usborne Famous lives for young readers, Florence Nightingale My First Trip to the hospital	Lost and Found  Emperor's Egg  Animal Riddles	Inside the Castle    Rumplestiltskin	Oliver’s Fruit Salad and Oliver’s vegetables by Vivian French   Jack and the Beanstalk
Year 2	Hot Air   The Blue Balloon   Miranda the Explorer	Non-fiction books about the Wright Brothers   Q Pootle 5	Toby and the Great Fire of London	Sansom's Titanic Journey Titanic Non-Fiction	Pirates  Blackbeard's Ship      The Little Mermaid	The Secret Garden
Year 3	Stone Age Boy	Light on cotton Rock	Shakletons' journey/ Ice Trap	The Egyptian Sleepover	Egyptian Cinderella	Charlotte's Web
Year 4	Over and Under the Rainforest  The Secret Wild	The Orchard Book of Greek Myths	Journey to the River Sea	Tiger Tiger!	Great and The Giants	When the Mountains Roared
Year 5	Anglo Saxon Boy	Curiosity - The Story of a Mars Rover	Survivors	Clockwork	Oh Maya God	Holes
Year 6	Pig Heart Boy	Treason	Street Child	Private Peaceful  Once series	Man who Walked the Towers  Erika Story / Rose Blanche	Where the World turns Wild

 

Reading for Pleasure

We believe that it is vital that children have the opportunity and time to read a variety of books so that they can enjoy reading. Not because it ticks off an objective but because it encourages a love or reading. Reading for pleasure. 

Children and staff in our school therefore have the opportunity to read regularly for pleasure. This is timetabled into the school day.

Children have access to high quality texts from classroom book corners. Teachers also prioritise reading aloud to their classes.

 

To inspire reading in children, we also:

• Invest heavily in reading resources and book stock that children will want to read and re-read including poetry, graphics novels and a wide range of text types. 
• Have members of staff who are excellent reading role models. They lead by example creating an environment that promotes reading as a socially engaging activity that is highly valued. 
• Promote books that we think children might enjoy or that staff are currently excited by.
• Make use of display, competitions and incentives.
• Welcome reading volunteers to provide children with more opportunities to share a book.
• Encourage families to spend time reading with their child.
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Every year we celebrate World Book Day. For 2024, every child in school was given a lollipop stick to decorate as their favourite book character. We received some very creative characters.

        

 

This year we chose to celebrate poetry as part of WBD. Every class learnt a poem to recite in our whole school assembly, we were very excited to hear poems being recited and enjoyed by all.