Our Reading Vision:

Through our teaching of reading, we hope to nurture and encourage children to have a love and respect for books, developing the skills to become life-long readers. We want our children to be able to read with enthusiasm, confidence, fluency  and understanding. Children should know, and be able to use, a full range of reading cues such as phonics, graphic, syntactic and contextual clues to support their reading. They should be taught and know a range of spelling and phonics rules to help them read with accuracy and decode unfamiliar words. We hope that through experiences of a wide range of literature, children will not only have an interest in words and their meaning, but also develop their growing vocabulary. Children are taught familiar features of narrative structures and how to access and understand a variety of non-fiction texts. Through a wide range of cross curricular reading, which includes both fiction and non-fiction, we aim to develop inventiveness, critical awareness and the imagination of our children.  

At St Mark's, we consider ourselves a community of readers. We expect all adults to model and communicate their love of reading in the following ways:

• A daily designated story time
• Opportunities for silent reading time in KS1 and KS2
• Shared and guided and reciprocal reading
• Daily opportunities for informal 'Book Talk', embedded across all curriculum subjects
• Providing exciting reading areas that inspire our children to read
• Reading with individual children

Reading Curriculum Overview: Intent, Implementation and Impact

Please click the document below to see our key aims for reading at St Mark's; the pedagogy, structure and organisation of our teaching of reading, and the impact of this for our pupils.

St Mark's Reading Curriculum Progression document:

Reading for Pleasure Vision:

Our aim at St Mark’s is to develop and entrench a strong, sustainable reading for pleasure culture within the school community. As part of our vision and values for reading, we want our children to be excited and inspired by books and grow into adults who will actively choose to read. We believe that children who read for pleasure deepen their understanding of the world around them: developing their compassion towards others and their understanding and tolerance of different heritages and cultures in the world around them. At St Mark’s we recognise the relationship between attainment in and enjoyment of reading; we aim for all our pupils across the school to develop and maintain positive attitudes towards reading so that they become lifelong enthusiastic readers.

Supporting Readers at Home:

Question prompts to support your child's reading comprehension at home:

Please see below the question prompts used by your child's class teacher when teaching and modelling specific comprehension skills in reading sessions at St Mark's. Please feel free to use this resource when engaging in discussions with your child about their home reading book, or when enjoying shared reading time together with your own texts.

100 Top Book Lists:

At St Mark's, we pride ourselves on our enticing and exciting classroom reading areas which offer our pupils a wide-range of fiction and non-fiction texts. In KS1, children's reading books are matched to each child's phonics phase to ensure texts are fully decodable. In KS2, books are carefully chosen and selected for each year group to ensure children are thrilled and excited about selecting texts that are suited to their reading ability. Please click below to view the top recommended books to read for your child's year group: