Our Vision for Reading at Trinity

At Trinity, we endeavour to embed a lifelong love of reading through the use of high quality, engaging texts to excite and inspire children to enjoy reading. We believe that developing children as expert and lifelong readers is a fundamental entitlement for every individual pupil and provides a firm foundation in all learning. With reading at the heart of our curriculum, we want our pupils to use reading to open doors, access and make sense of the world around them, thus improving their life chances. Through reading, our pupils have the opportunity to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually as local, national and global citizens.

Our curriculum teaches the skills which are necessary to for pupils to be confident and competent readers through carefully planned and sequenced lessons which build on prior knowledge over time. It is based on a triangular approach of enjoyment, fluency and comprehension.

Our curriculum teaches the skills which are necessary to for pupils to be confident and competent readers through carefully planned and sequenced lessons which build on prior knowledge over time. It is based on a triangular approach of enjoyment, fluency and comprehension.

Enjoyment: Throughout the school, we aim to foster a culture where books are valued, treasured and loved. By explicitly creating an environment where reading for pleasure is prioritised, we aim to develop a generation of pupils who have the independence, stamina and a desire to devour books and be excited about literature. Our teaching staff play a key role in motivating our pupils to read. We are models to our pupils at Trinity; we share our love for reading; we give a sense of choice about what they read; we promote a sense of purpose to our reading; we encourage our pupils’ to follow their interests and we celebrate their reading achievements. 

Fluency: At Trinity, we follow the DfE validated phonics programme ‘Unlocking Letters and Sounds’ to teach decoding and word recognition from the moment children start with us in Reception. The systematic teaching of phonics has high priority throughout Foundation Stage and Key Stage One so our pupils develop fluency (speed) as well as accuracy with decoding to the point that it becomes automatic and does not require conscious effort.

Comprehension: We recognise that a strong home-school partnership, with a shared understanding around the value of reading, is an essential factor in every child’s successful reading development. We ask parents to support our pupils by engaging in regular reading at home with school issued books, talking about and enjoying other texts perhaps linked to hobbies or interests, attending workshops led by school as appropriate and using online resources as directed by school to extend children’s reading experiences further.

How do we teach Reading at Trinity?

We follow the DfE accredited Unlocking Letters and Sounds systematic synthetic phonics programme at Trinity from Reception to Year 2. The children begin phonics as soon as they are full time in Reception and will experience phase 1 phonics in our Nursery setting. In Key Stage Two, we continue to develop our pupil’s phonological awareness through carefully planned and sequenced tasks which require pupils to reflect upon and manipulate the sound structures of language at different levels.

In reading lessons, we explicitly teach pupils strategies to monitor and overcome barriers to understanding (comprehension). These strategies include: prediction, questioning, clarifying, summarising and activating prior knowledge. At Trinity, these are modelled and practised until they become embedded and fluent. Reciprocal teaching is used to develop reading comprehension. This metacognitive approach encourages our pupils to become reflective and self-motivated learners, who are actively involved throughout the reading process and who can monitor their own comprehension as they read.