At Oughterside School, we LOVE reading. We believe passionately that all children should be taught the necessary skills to enable them to read easily, fluently and with good understanding.  Our goal is for all children to develop the habit of reading widely and often for both pleasure and information. We teach reading (word recognition and language comprehension) in a range of agreed ways using whole school resources.  For those children who are finding reading difficult we provide extra provision to support them in becoming more effective readers.

How do we teach reading?

We recognise and understand the importance that word reading is a crucial step for reading success therefore we place emphasis on the learning of phonics the early stages of reading. (Please see our phonics page for more information on our phonics provision). 

Reading Curriculum

At Oughterside, we teach reading by following the Literary Curriculum (Literacy Tree).
The Literary Curriculum is a complete, thematic, book-based approach to the teaching of primary English that places children’s literature at its core. 

The Literary Curriculum immerses children in a literary world, therefore creating strong levels of engagement to provide meaningful and authentic contexts for primary English.

Children become critical readers and acquire an authorial style as they encounter a wide-range of significant authors and a variety of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

As a whole-school approach, children explore at least 110 literary texts and experience at least 90 unique significant authors as they move through the school.

Children cannot be successful writers without being exposed to a breadth of different reading materials.  Each sequence of learning will have a text as its main driver to inspire and support the reading process.

Reading for Pleasure

At Oughterside we aim to ensure that our children develop a love and passion for reading. This will be demonstrated via children making informed choices when selecting a book to read; recommending books to each other and having the confidence to stop reading a book if they are not enjoying it. Children will understand that they can not only get pleasure from reading fiction books, but may demonstrate that non-fiction books can also bring joy. Children will choose to read a variety of materials  which will be in the school environment.

We achieve this in many ways including reading to our classes daily, having exciting and well stocked reading corners which promote a love of reading, allowing children (EYFS) to take home bed time stories and books from our school library, visits to our local library van, termly 'Read and Relax' sessions where parents are invited into school to read with their children and story sacks available to loan out to children in EYFS and KS1. 

Please take a look at some of our fantastic book displays…

World Book Day 2024

The whole school really enjoyed World Book Day, we were able to celebrate as a whole school and do lots of reading and book activities. We started off by enjoying some books together, the older children visited the children in Windermere to listen to them read and then share a story of their own with them. Crummock and Derwentwater Classes joined together to take part in The Footy and Booky quiz which we all enjoyed.  Shortly afterwards the whole school broke into 3 groups with a few children from each class the children were able to decorate a potato as a chosen character for a book.  This was lovely to watch as the older children really stepped up and assisted the younger children to help them, this collaboration continued after playtime as each group was able to have a go at spending time in the library, doing some book jigsaws and enjoy a book scavenger hunt, which was one of the biggest hits of the day.  All in all the children worked hard, had fun, enjoyed themselves and celebrated all things books, it was a great success.