At Garden Suburb Infant School, we prioritise the development of each child’s ability to communicate effectively and purposefully in English.  

We aim for our children to foster a love of reading, that will also feed into an enthusiasm for writing. We base our curriculum around good quality key texts, that reflect the diverse backgrounds of our children, and lead them to sources of knowledge and information as well as imaginative worlds beyond their own experience. We aim to create a rich and inspirational reading environment, giving our children opportunities to hear, share and engage with quality texts in a range of genres. 

Reading is an important life skill, and we aim for our children to enjoy reading, read widely and to have age-appropriate fluency, prosody (pitch, stress and timing) and comprehension.  Our reading curriculum is designed to provide a balanced and engaging approach to developing reading skills, which include both decoding and comprehension.  

The children have regular Reading Practice sessions, when specific reading skills such as prosody and comprehension are taught alongside phonic skills. We aim for the children to have two reading practise sessions in school, with some children supported with an “extra read”.

All children take a ‘reading for pleasure’ book home, to enjoy and share with an adult, as well as their fully phonetically decodable book.

All children have opportunities to discuss books and respond to texts through open-ended questioning, with more formal comprehension activities to support them to engage with the text, as they progress through the school, appropriate to their age and level of understanding

Click on the document at the bottom of the page, to access our "Reading Curriculum Progression Map", as well as a list of the key texts that we use, to inform and enrich our planning and teaching.

Our "Phonics and Early Reading Policy" can be accessed HERE.