At Eastbrook Primary school every day, every child has access to the highest quality teaching, learning and independent reading resources.
Our staff are highly skilled, our reading materials are of a high quality and we provide access to reading materials at home that engage as well as excite children of all ages and abilities and helps to foster a love of reading amongst all of our children.
Our curriculum offer at Eastbrook centres around high quality reading texts and they act as a focal point and learning catalyst for our learning in other subject areas.
EYFS & KS1
To truly develop a love of reading, we believe the first step towards this is to ensure it is an achievable and enjoyable activity to learn to read in the first instance.
In our Early Years and Key Stage 1 classrooms, we are deploying a daily phonics scheme supported by Read, Write Inc. (RWI) Each day, the children – in small groups of no more than 7 – recap the phonetic sounds they have previously been taught before moving on to focus on their ‘sound of the day’. This involves learning the sound by sight and using it within commonly used words to build up familiarity of sound recognition and therefore, independent reading.
Our use of the RWI scheme is underpinned by frequent assessment to ensure progress is being made and to support all of our children appropriately and accordingly.
The daily literacy lesson is derived from a text featured in either the Power of Reading, Poetry or Pictures which feature teaching sessions as supported by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE).
Information relating to the Read, Write Inc. scheme of learning can be found by clicking the link below.
KS2
To further develop the love for reading we start to foster in our EYFS and KS1 areas, we begin to broaden the horizons of children’s reading even further when they enter Year 3. With a solid understanding and implementation of their phonics learning, more time is given to looking at a wider range of text types, genres and uses of text in Key Stage 2.
Daily guided reading, supported by the class teacher, exposes the children to a variety of different texts. Sometimes a short, fictional novel is the focus for multiple weeks but others could feature a collection of poetry or magazine style articles, with all texts sharing elements of a theme or idea to emphasise the importance of reading across a range of text types. Daily activities involving these texts serve to develop and increase the reading skills of all children in Key Stage 2.
To maintain a high level of quality and consistency across the school, Key Stage 2 children also have the benefit of focussing their daily literacy hour around high quality texts as suggested by the CLPE through their Power of Reading and Poetry titles.
Further information about where we take inspiration from for our reading curriculum can be found at the link below.
https://clpe.org.uk/books/power-of-reading/about
Home Reading
Every child at Eastbrook is issued with our very own bespoke reading records. The content and guidance contained within is appropriate to the key stage the child is in. Our reading records also help our children to identify their school house which serves to support the character education we pride ourselves on at Eastbrook Primary school.
As part of our commitment to giving children access to the highest quality reading materials at home as well as at school, we provide opportunities for children to access online reading services alongside the taking home of physical books from school.
Reception – Year 2 children have access to phonics books provided by RWI online to support and embed their sound of the day at home. They also have access to a wider range of texts courtesy of Bug Club.
Some Year 2 students as well as the entirety of Key Stage 2 children have access to Oxford Reading Buddy, an online reading service provided by Oxford University Press.
Our Leader of Learning for Reading is Mr. C. Peake
