Our Reading Spine Rationale

At Ashbourne Primary School, we aim to instill a love of reading in all children. We teach children both how to learn to read and to read to learn. Learning to read focuses primarily on the phonics skills of the children and being able to decode and blend sounds to read. This also includes alien words and high frequency words. Reading to Learn focuses primarily upon the reading skills children require to read for pleasure and to develop subject knowledge. These reading skills are taught explicitly in our daily guided reading and whole-class reading lessons which are in groups or whole class. We plan our English lessons around high quality core texts, which also link to the topics and themes for that term.

This reading spine is intended to offer our children a core bank of texts that ensures they experience a range of high-quality texts and authors during their time at school. We have identified 4-6 key high-quality core texts for each year group for each topic taught. The texts are made up of a range of text types, including fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Teachers use these in a range of ways, as whole-class texts to share, during guided reading or whole-class reading lessons, as part of their literacy lessons and in connection with our topics. We have ensured that the texts we have chosen are engaging and encourage enjoyment of reading.