Key Stage 2 Reading
The overarching aim for English in the national curriculum is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written word, and to develop their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment. The national curriculum for English aims to ensure that all pupils:
read easily, fluently and with good understanding
develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
In Year 3, 4, 5 and 6, our children secure their reading fluency and develop their reading comprehension skills user longer, more complex texts.
Reading Fluency
As a school, we recognise the importance of fluency as a bridge to comprehension. We know that pupils need to be able to decode accurately and automatically to help make cognitive space available to consider meaning. Therefore, every Friday, in Key Stage 2 (and in Year 2 in the summer term if children have finished their RWI programme), fluency is explicitly taught through our ‘Friday Fluency’ session to help improve children’s prosody and automaticity. We use resources that support us to deliver a rigorous and sequential approach to the reading curriculum, which develops the reading fluency of every child over an extended period of time.
Each session explores a bespoke piece of fiction or non-fiction, written to engage and educate young readers whilst at the same time giving them an opportunity to build their reading fluency over time.
Each text has been given a lexile level, a word count and a target reading time, with the time matching exactly how long it would take a fluent reader at that stage to read the piece.
Each half term, all Key Stage 2 children’s reading fluency will be assessed. The reading fluency extracts have been modelled on the American DIBELs fluency assessments but written in a style and using extracts more suited to a UK audience. Each assessment includes a pupil extract (which the pupil will have in front of them to read from) and an adult marksheet which the adult will have in front of them to annotate as the child reads.
