At The Harlington and Sundon Academy Trust, we value reading. We are skilled, enthusiastic and confident readers.  We have ambitious aims for all of our children to become lifelong learners and to build their cultural capital through reading. At The Harlington and Sundon Academy Trust, our children are encouraged to become passionate and motivated readers who feel confident in their own skills and enjoy reading for pleasure.  They have the self-confidence to read a range of genres and lessons taught at the school incorporate a variety of thought-provoking and inspiring texts. As children move through the year groups, they develop fluency and understanding. These important skills are focused upon through their lessons, interventions and regular reading time with adults and peers. We carry out high quality interventions which are regularly reviewed to ensure that children achieve their full potential and make progress.

Please see here for our reading progression of skills. Reading Progression of Skills

Our Reading Curriculum

At The Harlington and Sundon Academy Trust, we ensure that our whole class teaching and interventions target the progression of both decoding and language comprehension.  Early reading is taught through daily discrete phonics sessions, following the Read Write inc programme.  Our aim is to develop an early love of reading by introducing and sharing a wide variety of texts with children, including those which they may not be able to access independently. In order to consolidate their learning, children take home a decodable phonics book matched to the sounds they are learning or have learnt.

Reading for pleasure is encouraged and children regularly have the opportunity to listen to texts, beyond their current stage of independent fluency and comprehension. These texts are read aloud by an adult who models appropriate fluency, expression and intonation. Children are given the opportunity to discuss their understanding of challenging reading material and adults support them to develop their comprehension strategies. Reading for pleasure is not at all limited to fictional texts as children are given access to a range of non-fiction books, magazines and digital reading material.

Children are encouraged to read independently, with their peers, younger pupils and adults at home.  All children take home a reading book every day to share with an adult at home.

 Reading at Home

The two reading books your child will bring home are from the Read, Write Inc. scheme and link to the phonics learning taking place in school.  One of the books your child should be able to read without support because they have been practising it in school in their phonics groups.  The second book is a 'Book Bag' book which contains a new story but with known sounds and gives you the opportunity to support your child in reading new content. They will also bring home a free-choice library book which they have selected independently and which may be outside of their reading ability but can be shared for enjoyment with an adult.  Once children have completed the Read, Write, Inc scheme, they will bring home books from the Oxford Reading Tree scheme which incorporates a mixture of fiction and non-fiction books.  The scheme provides consistent progression from their early phonics learning to fluent, competent reading.

Alongside their books, children will bring home their reading record where children’s progress in reading (both with adults at home and in school) is recorded. These reading records also contain a number of helpful information pages for parents and carers, such as phonics summaries, ideas for questioning, age-related grammar expectations, grammatical definitions and activities for children to complete once they have finished a book.

To support reading at home, each year group has some suggested questions you may wish to ask your child while you are reading with them.