We intend to provide all pupils with a high-quality aspirational curriculum in English that will teach them to speak, read and write fluently so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions to others confidently and effectively. Our Reading curriculum aims to develop children’s love of reading, writing and discussion and provide equal opportunities, allowing all pupils to achieve success. Over the course of their time at Cathedral Primary School, children are supported to develop competence with the various strands that come together to form a competent, effective and fluent reader.  

You can see a full overview of the intent, implementation and impact of our Reading curriculum here.

We aim to achieve this through teaching a highly ambitious and aspirational curriculum that includes:

• Explicitly teaching vocabulary
• Explicit opportunities to develop fluency
• Explicitly teaching core reading strategies
• Exposing children to high quality literature and a broad set of texts that reflects a diverse community
• Actively promoting and building strong partnerships with our families
  
  

Click here to view a voice over recording of the slides that were used prior to the workshops at our recent Reading Curriculum event.

In Reception, Key Stage 1 and Year 3, we use a phonics programme called 'Unlocking Letters and Sounds' to introduce synthetic phonics systematically. Children are initially taught letter sounds and are then introduced to letter names and taught to blend sounds in order to read whole words.

For further information about our approach to phonics, visit our phonics page here.

Children read phonetically decodable books before they move to books containing high frequency key words, following the PM Benchmarking levelled scheme so that pupils master phonics and foster a love of stories and reading fluency. 

Children in Years 1 - 6 have a daily reading lesson. This involves a structured approach to whole class teaching of reading and the explicit teaching of vocabulary and comprehension strategies.  Each day, all children have a read aloud story time during which teachers read carefully selected books to their class. We aim to encourage a love of reading through events like celebrating world book day, trips to the local library and author visits.