At Canvey Junior School, reading is taught through the combination of vocabulary and comprehension skills, designed to expand the children’s vocabulary and enhance their understanding of a wide variety of different texts, such as poetry, non-fiction and both modern and classic texts. We feel the importance of reading for pleasure cannot be underestimated and can benefit a child’s education, social and cognitive development, their wellbeing and their mental health.

From years 3-6, our guided reading lessons across each half term, focus on equipping the children with skills they need to answer questions based on 7 different content domains: vocabulary, retrieval, prediction, making comparisons, summarising, author's choice and inference.

The 7 content domains all support the children’s confidence in answering comprehension-based questions and gaining a deeper understanding of the texts they read. To further support this development, we use Accelerated Reader, which is our reading program used to assess children’s current reading proficiency. This program assesses their understanding of what they read, not just the decoding of words, and assigns books which are targeted at their reading level. Once a child completes a book, they then take a short quiz which assesses their understanding. All children are assessed at the start of each new term.

Any child who is identified as an early reader is supported through the use of phonic reading books to support their phonic knowledge and develop their reading proficiency. Support for early readers is also provided through Catch Up, which is a book-based approach to assist learners in their reading of books so they can improve their confidence in reading and word recognition processes (including phonics) as well as language comprehension skills.

We believe our approach to reading provides children with the opportunities to learn, understand and develop a love of reading, which we hope will enable them to develop in other areas of the curriculum and life, including: writing, spelling, communication and social and emotional skills.