Reading at Chennestone

We love reading at Chennestone Primary School and we aspire that our children will share in the pleasure that can be gained by a love of books!  We value reading as a key life skill and are dedicated to enabling our pupils to reach their full potential as lifelong readers.  We believe reading is key to academic success and enable children to leave us able to make a difference.  Reading can be a vehicle  to explore diversity and develop the children's cultural capital.

Reading is used to support learning.  Reading is inclusive and is the bedrock to all areas of the National Curriculum.  Through books children engage with the topics they are discovering and can explore the world in which we live.  Reading happens across the whole curriculum.

We believe children move along their reading journey of 'Learning to Read to Reading to Learn'.  Children develop strategies to tackle tricky words, building on the phonics learnt in KS1 and using other strategies too, such as reading around the word.  For those children where further phonics learning is required, we plan targeted interventions.  

We expect children to read at home at least three times a week and expect parents to support their child's reading development.  We encourage parents and children to make comments in the child's reading record book.

We use Accelerated Reader at Chennestone to motivate and enthuse children to read for pleasure and to celebrate our children's amazing reading across the year at school.

What is Accelerated Reader?

AR is part of the Renaissance Reading software package recently adopted by the school to encourage and motivate children to become avid readers and enable our classes to build communities of readers.  

Your child will choose a book at their own level and read it at their own pace.  When finished, they will take a short quiz on the computer, the quiz allows teachers to track the books that the children have enjoyed also gives a word count so that we are able to celebrate our word millionaires within school.

AR is used as part of a comprehensive reading programme in place at Chennestone for children from Year 2 - 6.  While we continue to teach the skills of reading in class through whole class reading texts and whole class texts, the AR books chosen by your child will provide them with the opportunity to apply the knowledge and skills they have developed. 

What are STAR Reading Tests?          

Every child taking part in AR will complete a STAR reading test at the beginning of the year and at the start of each half-term.  It is a roughly twenty minute multiple choice reading assessment completed individually on the computer.  Questions continually adjust to your child’s responses so if their response is correct, the difficulty level is increased.  If they miss a question or give an incorrect answer, the difficulty level is reduced. 

The STAR reading test, along with teacher judgement assists us in identifying a child’s ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) range and provides the children with an area of books to choose from in the library. 

Class Novel

Reading aloud is one of the most important elements to our reading for pleasure element at Chennestone. Reading aloud allows our children to experience and enjoy rich, texts that they might not meet otherwise. We make it a priority at Chennestone and have a dedicated class novel set for each year group across the year. Reading aloud is a non negotiable that occurs everyday and time is specifically allocated to enable all of our children to have this quality listening and appreciation time. By reading well chosen books aloud, teachers help classes to become communities of readers – ensuring they can all share in experiences of a wide repertoire of books they enjoy. This links to the commitment we have to deepening and broadening our children’s vocabulary and promoting reading for pleasure.