At Edenbridge Primary School, we believe that reading is integral to children’s lives. It provides the gateway to future learning and enables children to reach people, places and times they would otherwise never encounter. A good reader is well equipped to fully access the curriculum and therefore reach their full potential. At Edenbridge Primary School, we aim to ensure that reading is integral to every lesson. We believe that reading is essential to all areas of the curriculum and as such should be encouraged and promoted at every opportunity. Children should be taught to read proficiently for their age and to have developed a love of books. Our aim is to inspire children to read a wide range of books from a wide range of authors that reflect the culture and diversity of the children in our school community. We aim to foster children who read for pleasure and purpose.

We want our Reading teaching to reflect our curriculum and our learners so each year group has a carefully curated booklist that matches their topic and exposes the children to authors, genres and vocabulary that are exciting and challenging.

Our youngest readers learn to decode efficiently through the Little Wandle Phonic scheme and this is the primary focus until children are reading independently.

Each week a key skill such as; decoding; retrieving; summarising; predicting; identifying meaning and impact of words and phrases; inferring or making comparisons is practised. Teachers use formative assessment to identify skills to be reviewed and areas of misconceptions to be addressed and allow children to reflect on their own learning by correcting errors. Our pitch and progression document also gives guidelines on which skill to prioritise each term. The lessons are differentiated to ensure that the children are scaffolded appropriately to access the text and to show what they have understood.