At Guildhall Feoffment Community School, we believe that developing secure reading skills empowers children to make strong educational progress across the curriculum, both with us and as they proceed onwards. Literature provides an avenue for discussion and explorations and is therefore viewed as an integral part of teaching and learning in all subjects.

Our school fundamentally embraces the belief that reading is one of life’s greatest pleasures. We promote the love of reading from the moment each young learner joins our school community. We read to our children regularly, talk about books, model good reading behaviours and offer appealing places to read. 

Reading teaches a child about the world around them and about events outside of their own experience. A child who reads, has a developed imagination and can relate to other people through their experience of interacting with fictional characters. Therefore, their communication skills and ability to empathise increase, socially preparing them for their future life and widening their opportunities. Additionally, exposure to literature improves a child’s vocabulary and writing skills: they subconsciously absorb new words, sentence structures and punctuation which are subsequently displayed in their writing.

We believe that it is important to teach writing through reading and therefore provide at least one enticing text for every topic of our Writing Curriculum. We assist our children to become high quality writers through this exposure. Furthermore, it helps the children appreciate that reading is about more than just stories and can confidently read newspaper articles, instructions, letters, diaries and non-chronological reports.  Additionally, each History, Geography and Science Topic is supported by current, key-stage matched non-fiction books. These are used to engage the children and to provide contexts for cross-curricular writing. 

Whilst we incorporate reading into as much of our teaching as possible, we also teach Reading as a discrete subject through whole class reading sessions. This programme of skills driven learning is tailored to ensure every child in our care becomes a ‘Balanced Reader’ who can decode, read with fluency and skilful phrasing, comprehend both literally and inferentially and respond eloquently.