At St. Joseph’s Catholic Primary School, we believe that reading is an essential life-skill and all children should learn to be fluent and confident readers. We aim to foster a life-long passion for reading in our children and we provide them with the knowledge and skills they need to become independent readers.

We immerse our children in a wide range of texts, which are rich in vocabulary and content; encouraging discussion and the forming of opinions through exploration, inference and analysis.

When children join our school in Reception, they are taught phonics daily following a synthetic phonics teaching programme produced by Ruth Miskin called Read Write Inc. (RWI) Phonics as a basis to teach our pupils to read. This learning continues throughout Key Stage 1 and can extend into KS2 should children need some extra support with decoding and reading.

As children enter Key Stage 2, whole class guided reading sessions continue to build on these skills and the use of language associated with ‘VIPERS’ (Vocabulary, Infer, Predict, Explain, Retrieve and Sequence/Summarise) is used throughout.

As we strive to build a love of reading for pleasure, every class has a class novel which is read by the class teacher, modelling good reading skills and exposing our children to rich vocabulary and stimulating story lines.

We champion reading in the lives of all our children and their families, and we celebrate this throughout the year, notably celebrating books in our lives through whole-school events such as World Book Day.

By the time our pupils leave St. Josephs, they enjoy reading for pleasure, are capable and competent in their fluency and comprehension, and have engaged with a wide range of texts. We aim to help mould confident readers, who use their reading skills to access the world around them and carry a passion for reading which outlasts their time at primary school, becoming life-long passionate readers.