Promoting a Love of Reading
As we love reading and recognise the power of the spoken word, all curriculum themes are centred round a key text and supplementary texts that demonstrate to our pupils the purpose of reading and how a lifelong love of reading helps us develop the skills needed to succeed and enjoy life.
Click here to view our school quality text list linked to Curious Curriculum themes.
Reading Curriculum
We have used Scarborough’s ‘Reading Rope’ to coordinate the different components of reading and have developed our reading strategy to ensure the different strands of reading are taught explicitly.
Phonics
At Filton Hill, in Summer 2025, we made the decision to change phonics scheme to Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS). All members of staff have attended a full day of training in September 2025. Phonics workshops for parents take place every year.
In order for a learner to become a fluent reader, they must be taught all the common ways of representing English speech sounds (phonemes). A systematic approach is required, teaching from simple 1 – sound: 1 – letter correspondences to sounds represented by several different spellings. The order in which the code is presented should correlate with the complexity of the conceptual knowledge required to use it.
Given the fact that speech is uttered one sound at a time, and that written English is a means of recording those sounds via visual symbols that we call spellings/letters, the following skills are essential:
- The skill of blending individual sounds to enable the construction of meaningful words, such as /c/…/a/…/t/…’cat’
- The skill of segmenting individual sounds in speech is vital for both reading and spelling. To read, the reader must segment the sound-spelling correspondences in a word before blending them to make a recognisable word.
When writing, the same skill of segmenting will also be needed. The learner needs to be able to split the word ‘dog’ into its three component sounds /d/…/o/…/g/ to access the alphabet code and then represent each sound graphemically.
- The skill of manipulating the individual sounds within words to enable one sound to be replaced by another. This skill is essential in order to deal with the problems of decoding that might arise when a spelling represents more than one sound. In the interest of reading quickly and fluently the reader needs to be able to manipulate sounds instantly without having to revisit the cumbersome process of blending the whole word together again from the beginning.
It is important to note that speed and accuracy need to be achieved for all three of the above skills for them to become automatic. Once the process is automatic the reader can then concentrate solely on understanding and extracting information from the text they are reading.
Our Intent
Everywhere you look in our school, you will see that we promote and celebrate a love of reading. Children are exposed to a variety of authors from the past through to the present, promoting a range of genres within non-fiction and fiction texts. Our learning environments support opportunities and spaces to develop the enjoyment of reading in classrooms and shared spaces.
A Celebration of Reading
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We invite authors into visit our school at every opportunity! The children LOVE meeting them and getting their own copies of the book signed!
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Our displays around school always promote reading and display books linked to the themes from our curious curriculum.
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Reading Expectations
The school expectation is that children will be reading at least five times each week. On a Friday, the class with the most children reading is proudly recognised by the rest of the school in our Celebration Assembly. The winning class receives Zip Wire time as a reward for their efforts.
