In Early Years, pupils work towards the Early Learning Goals by retelling stories, anticipating events, and using new vocabulary in discussions and role-play. They engage with stories, rhymes, poems, and non-fiction to build understanding and language skills.
From Year 1 onwards, pupils develop a love of reading and comprehension through listening to and discussing a wide range of texts, linking reading to their experiences, and learning key story structures. They practise predicting, making inferences, asking questions, and explaining their understanding. The school implements a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme; this programme is Little Wandle Letters and Sounds.
As pupils progress through Years 2 to 6, they read increasingly complex texts, explore themes and conventions, use dictionaries, and analyse language and structure. They learn to retrieve information from non-fiction, summarise ideas, and participate in discussions. Performance reading, such as reciting poems and reading scripts aloud, helps develop fluency and expression.
Our aim is to foster pleasure in reading, vocabulary development, and deep comprehension, ensuring pupils become confident, independent readers who can understand and interpret a wide range of texts.
In Years 5 and 6, pupils at The Oaks continue to develop positive attitudes to reading and deepen their comprehension skills. They read and discuss a wide range of texts, including fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction, myths, legends, modern and heritage literature, and texts from diverse cultures. Pupils learn to recommend books, identify themes and conventions, make comparisons across texts, and perform poems and plays with expression.
Comprehension focuses on understanding meaning, asking questions, making inferences, predicting outcomes, summarising main ideas, and analysing how language, structure, and presentation contribute to meaning. Pupils also evaluate authors’ use of language, including figurative language, and consider its impact on the reader. They learn to distinguish fact from opinion, retrieve and present information from non-fiction, and participate in discussions and debates, providing reasoned justifications for their views.
Our approach is supported by an evidence-based comprehension curriculum, adapted from The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading. This includes structured daily reading lessons (fluency, extended reading, and comprehension), explicit vocabulary instruction, progression maps, exemplar question stems, and suggested texts to ensure pupils become confident, critical readers.
