At Laddingford, we believe that good reading skills start with good listening and questioning skills. Until children learn to read by themselves, we read them texts from a wide range of authors from different backgrounds dealing with a huge variety of stories and information. Discussion of and debate about the texts we read is a core part of our ethos at Laddingford. Teachers model the range of skills and the inner dialogue a reader needs to extract all the meaning from a text:

• Prediction - what's going to happen next?

• Questioning - what, where, when, where, who, how, why?

• Clarifying - what's going on here? How does it link to what's happened before?

• Summarising - what's happened so far?

• Inference - what does that imply? What clues have we found?

• Activating prior knowledge - what do I already know about this?

 

We use CLPE's The Power of Reading scheme and Pie Corbett's Reading Spine to ensure that we cover a wide range of quality, class texts. We also encourage all our staff to read and research widely and flexibly use any texts that they think will compliment our curriculum, creating a large archive of planning and texts that we can use collaboratively. Our current project is to boost the use and usefulness of our school library.