Reading 

Reading at Harper Green School 

At Harper Green School, we believe that reading widely and enhancing your vocabulary, both inside and outside of school, improves students’ academic ability, allows students to articulate themselves accurately and in turn, prepares students for life beyond academia.

We have three strands to reading at Harper Green School:

• Learning to read: those that require further support and intervention
• Reading to learn: how our curriculum supports reading comprehension
• Reading for enjoyment: how we encourage reading widely

Learning to read

When students arrive at Harper Green, their reading is tested and we assign those that need support to an intervention. The intervention that they will access is dependent upon their need. For our weakest readers, who require support with phonics, they will begin the FreshStart programme. For those who can already decode, they will be referred to our comprehension intervention.

We’ve had great success with our interventions and here’s what some of our students have had to say:

I really love my reading intervention. We learn about sounds with Miss Homer and she helps us understand why words sound different and how to spell them – JA Y9

My reading lessons helped me do better in my other lessons like Science and Geography. I know how to segment words and read them clearly. Miss made me so confident - RMB Y11

 Miss Homer has changed my attitude towards reading. I didn’t like it before because I struggled but I read out loud in lessons without worrying now. Loads of my teachers have said I’m more confident– AS Y10

 I love my reading lessons with Miss. She knows what I find hard and she teaches me how to read in English. I can read in Urdu and English now and it’s amazing. I come to intervention with my friend and we both love our lessons - AR and MR Y8

Reading to learn

There is a uniform approach to reading across the curriculum. All staff have been trained to deliver new vocabulary and texts in a way that reduces cognitive load and supports comprehension.

Alongside reading in each subject, students receive the following in our curriculum:

• a form time reading programme
• a Reading for Pleasure lesson through the Ark Mastery Curriculum
• Knowledge organisers to support with new vocabulary and comprehension of key knowledge
• KS3 receive Academic Reading Projects as part of their homework

All texts selected as part of the projects, reading lessons and form time programme are selected with the view of being able to expose students to a more diverse range of writers and protagonists and expand their cultural capital. Just some of the texts our students read are: Goldfish Boy, The girl of Ink and Stars, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Lord of the Flies, Never Let Me Go.

Reading for enjoyment

As a school, we promote reading widely. Please see below just some of the ways we have celebrated reading recently.

• We have a Library with an extensive range of both fiction and non-fiction
• We use reading as a reward, please see the images below of our vending machines where students receive tokens for living our values of work hard, take part and do the right thing
• Around the school, we have a range of non-fiction texts that students can interact with in their social time
• We celebrate all the calendared events across the year, including World Book Day, National Read a Book Day and Roald Dahl Day to name a few.

Various ways we’ve celebrated reading

Our vending machines are used for rewards

Guess which literary character is coming to dinner?

Our SLT celebrating World Book Day

 A snippet of our Reading Advent Calendar