Reading

 

At Trewirgie Infants’ & Nursery School, we want every child to develop a life-long love of reading and to choose to read for pleasure. To achieve this, we teach reading from two angles: building the skills that enable children to read, and providing experiences that inspire the desire to read.

Daily story times are timetabled in every class, giving all children the chance to listen to, share, and enjoy a wide range of high-quality stories. These texts are carefully selected for their rich language and thought-provoking contexts. Stories are re-read for familiarity and made available for children to revisit and share within school.

Each classroom has a dedicated reading area stocked with carefully chosen books. These selections reflect the children’s interests, link to current topics, and connect with Talk for Writing texts. Quality fiction, poetry, and non-fiction from our core reading spine are also available throughout the school. Children enjoy regular visits to the school library, a welcoming and engaging environment where they can share stories with friends or simply curl up with a good book.

Pupils follow Read, Write, Inc., our scheme of learning for Phonics delivery. Once they have completed this scheme, they then continue their reading journey ‘Off-Scheme’. For more information about what this looks like, please refer to our Trewirgie Reading Comprehension Curriculum Policy.

In Year 1 and Year 2, pupils take part in Guided Reading lessons. These sessions involve whole-class, paired, and teacher-led reading using challenging texts chosen to expand vocabulary and strengthen comprehension and inference skills.

Each Year Group has a diverse array of Key Texts which help build on their love of reading and their understanding of the world. These carefully considered texts offer pupils diverse perspectives, cultures and story telling that also develop their curricular learning. Please note that these are under review and next texts will be added over the course of 2025-26. 

Important Additional information in developing Reading Skills - Information for families;

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For World Book Day, the children were inspired by local Cornish author Ben Rowswell who came to talk about being an author and getting is work published. He shared his book ‘An Alphabetical Adventure of Cornwall’ and did workshops with our Y1 children to set them on the path of writing their own Alphabetical Adventure of Redruth.

It is important to us that our children develop a lifelong love of reading. Each class has a dedicated daily class story time, where the children are read to by both teachers and teaching assistants. Teachers select books that will engage the children, support their interests and the learning that is taking place as well as encourage the children to experience a wide range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Reading for Pleasure sessions feature in the daily timetables of all three year groups. This is a time when children can choose what to read, where to read and who to share their book with. The children enjoy the opportunity to explore new books and revisit favourites.

In addition, our Key Stage 1 classes have a timetabled daily shared reading session. In these sessions the children are immersed in a text each week and given the opportunity to acquire and decipher new language. They are also encouraged to develop their skills as a reader –comprehension, interpretation and fluency. By sharing a text together children of all abilities are able to enjoy, engage and talk, sharing their understanding and opinion with others in a safe and positive environment.

It is also important to us to build a reading community, involving families and making community links to support the children as they develop their love of reading for pleasure. Have a look at the photos in the gallery of our first ‘booknics’ where children came together to explore our new books from the Books for Topics website and talk about their favourites. Next time we hope to invite families to come along and share some of our favourites that we have read this year so far and some that will be new to us.