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 reading books that your child may bring home are from a variety of schemes: Sounds-Write, Dandelion Launchers and Oxford Reading Tree (such as “Project X”, “Biff, Chip and Kipper”, “Songbirds”). They are a mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

The books will be aligned to a book band colour and box number and these provide consistent progression from early phonics to fluent, competent reading. Children will be able to read their book with a little adult support to understand vocabulary or pronounce some unfamiliar words. Alongside their book, children will take 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.

We also enhance our home reading provision with e-books through a school subscription to Reading Eggs. All children have a username and password to access this and use the Reading Eggs Library to read a wide range of digital texts and e-books (fiction and non-fiction). They also have access to Reading Eggs ‘lessons’ where they will be set particular books and focussed questions at their reading ability to develop their fluency and comprehension.

During the summer, Miss Sanby began developing a well-being area for children on our back field. One of the features of this space is a bespoke reading chair which is surrounded by wooden seating. This peaceful area will be a fantastic place for children to read and listen to stories, fostering an appreciation and love of literature.