St Christopher’s RC Primary & Nursery School

The Teaching of Reading at St Christopher's

Please also see our English curriculum (Curriculum/subjects)

Reading Planet Reading Scheme

The Reading Planet Scheme is organised into 3 groups:

Rocket Phonic Books: These are our fully decodable books in book band levels from Pink Band to Orange. Fully decodable means that your child will be able to use their phonics knowledge and skills to read the book.

Comet Street Kids: These books are levelled books, Pink Band to White Band that are "highly decodable." This means that when reading children can use their phonic skills to read most words and can use other reading skills e.g. vocabulary knowledge and understanding of the story to work out unknown words. 

Galaxy Books: These are a range of levelled highly decodable books that link to curriculum areas such as History, Geography, Science and Art. Some of the Comet Street Kids characters will feature in these books. 

In Reception and KS1, the children will bring home two books on Monday and change for two books on Thursday. One book will be a Rocket Phonics book, to develop their phonic skills and the other will be a Comet Street Kids book or a Galaxy book to develop their comprehension skills. 

Developing a love of reading

At the foundation level and through KS1 and KS2 the emphasis is on further developing the pupils’ interest and pleasure in reading independently and with confidence. The focus is on words and sentences and how they are put together to form texts. They bring meaning to the texts they read and say what they like and dislike about them. Teachers model a range of teaching strategies, including the identification of sentence structure and the function of punctuation marks. They also give children opportunities to practise phonic skills and word recognition in context.

At key stage Two, pupils meet a wider range of texts in fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Teaching focuses on developing pupils’ reading skills:

•  Information Retrieval: Asking the children to pick out certain information or evidence to support an answer.
•  Inference: an interpretation of the information given.
•  Deduction: An understanding based on the evidence given.
•  Summarise: using parts of the text to sum up an answer.

 E.g. The police find a body with a knife sticking out of it.

 Information retrieval: what was used to kill the person?

We can infer that someone didn’t like that person.

We can deduce that the person is dead as they have a knife sticking out of them.  

Reading at Home

Children at St Christopher’s are encouraged to read at home which allows them to read a rich and varied selection of texts. They are asked to read for at least 15 minutes a night and the teacher will check this by monitoring the reading record which will have been completed by the parent or adult. 

Book Banding

Children will progress through books using book banding.