English 

St Mary’s Reading Intent

At St Mary’s Junior School, we believe that reading has to be a top priority as it allows the children to access everything that our curriculum has to offer. The skill of reading underpins everything that is taught and opens the door not only to learning across the curriculum but to many other opportunities in the wide world

To promote a love of reading, we focus on:

• Having staff that are positive reading role models who can share their love of books and enthuse the pupils to want to read more and discuss their independent book thoughts.
• Promoting positive reading relationships between home and school to encourage everyone to love to read as this can open doors for the future.
• Our children wanting to read; to want to become better readers and to know that reading can be a pleasure as well as learning new knowledge. We want our children to experience the feeling of “escaping into a good book”.
• Creating reading opportunities across our school to be ambitious for all our children and to ensure our disadvantaged and SEN children have the same opportunities to experience books and other texts that all other children have.
• All our pupils to be able to read fluently and with confidence in any subject by the time they move to Secondary School.
• Reading to support our children to gain knowledge across the curriculum.
• Our carefully planned Guided Reading lessons to support the children’s comprehension skills and our spelling and phonics lessons to encourage fluency.
• Our school being a language rich environment with vocabulary rich reading material and good quality texts for the children to choose from.

At St Mary’s Junior School, all children are to be read to regularly to ensure they are familiar with both classic stories and authors, and newer texts and authors. We want children to discover that reading allows them access to new knowledge, revisit prior knowledge and understand more about what they want to learn about, fuelling their own imagination. We aim to open doors for our pupils through reading, expose them to adventures, experiences and ‘cultural capital’ that are not always accessible in ‘real life’. We aim to share texts that reflect and expand upon the diversity of our community and allow every child to access text where they themselves are reflected in the protagonists.

We aim for St Mary’s to be a reading school full of avid and enthusiastic readers. We want to create a reading community encompassing staff, pupils, and people at home, who care about book, believe that books can be a gateway to knowledge and succeed in life through the skill acquisition of reading. We can be the St Mary's reading team!