At the Kennet Valley, reading lies at the very heart of our Christian community. For our children to truly flourish, they must be equipped with more than just the essential academic, artistic and athletic skills. We ensure our reading curriculum in aspirational, sustainable and inclusive. It is designed to broaden, deepen and consolidate children’s knowledge and understanding of the world whilst providing the space for them to branch out and engage in personal enquiry appropriate to their age and stage of development.

Reading threads through our curriculum. Our reading strategy ensures all children are able to leave Kennet Valley as fluent, life-long readers who are ready for the next stage of their education and spiritual journey.

Our approach to teaching reading is an equitable one: we secure a research informed universal provision and additional ‘targeted’ academic strategies for those children at risk of underachievement. This way we can be sure that our reading strategy is built around our mustard seed parable:  “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches”. 

Reading Implementation

We believe that laying the foundations for a life-long love of reading is core to the happiness of our children and we therefore promote this across all curriculum areas. We are insistent that children have access to a wide variety of high quality texts. Building our offer around quality and choice takes time. This approach is currently under development.

In the Early Years and KS1 we ensure the delivery of our Synthetics Phonics Programme (Little Wandle) is supported by high quality phonetically matched books that children take home to celebrate with their families.

Across EYFS, KS1 and KS2 our children will share carefully selected high quality texts linked a child’s reading age, interest or reading preference. These texts are carefully pitched using Book Banding, The Book Trust and Open University Reading for Pleasure. We ensure our choices include popular children’s authors, classics from our rich culture heritage and a wide range of non-fiction and poetry.

To aid appropriate book-match, beyond phonically decodable texts, all children are assessed through Salford Reading Tests and then supported to select a banded book or similar ‘reading for pleasure’ book to take home and share with their families.

We are currently investing in significant improvements to our reading for pleasure library. Our aim is to provide all our pupils with the choice of a wide variety high quality texts throughout their time at Kennet Valley.