The Haven Church of England Methodist Primary School

Reading at The Haven

Teaching of Reading

Once pupils have successfully completed our phonics programme in Key Stage One, they progress to Destination Reader sessions from Year 3 onwards, where they continue to develop their reading fluency, comprehension, and critical thinking skills.

Destination Reader

At The Haven School we teach destination reader in Years 3, 4, 5 and 6. Destination Reader is an approach to the explicit teaching of reading which blends a range of learning behaviours and reading strategies. Together, this allows children to explore and understand texts independently, at a deeper level.

Firstly, children are introduced to three key learning behaviours, which foster both engagement and independence.

Learning Behaviour

Support and actively listen to others

Discuss and explain ideas

Take responsibility for their own / their group’s learning

Once these learning behaviours are embedded, the children learn seven key reading strategies in turn which help them deepen their understanding of texts.

Reading Strategies

Predicting

Inferring

Asking questions

Evaluating

Clarifying

Making connections

Summarising

Alongside this, every week children will have a Written Comprehension lesson (Big Picture) which explicitly teaches the children how to be an active reader and to develop written responses to a range of question types.

Resources and text types

Each lesson the children have access to their ‘reading bookmark’ that references the 3 key learning behaviours and reading strategies. This supports dialogue and book talk throughout DR lessons with sentence stems.

Throughout Destination Reader sessions, pupils develop the core-reading strategies through exposure to a variety of different text types including fiction, non-fiction and poetry. The high-quality texts used by teachers within Destination Reader sessions link to class topics and sessions are taught daily in addition to our English sessions.

Reading Working Walls

Each class has a Reading wall that supports children’s understanding of the text they are reading. It helps to:

Build Knowledge:

Context - author/genre

Link to other texts

Keep track of the text

Build Skills:

Visual reminder of strategies

Clarifying toolkit

Learning behaviours

Our reading walls aim to strengthen long-term understanding by helping children connect what they know with new learning.

Weekly Structure of DR lessons (example)

Accelerated Reader

We use the Accelerated Reader programme in Years 2 to 6 as both an assessment tool and to promote a love of reading. It is student-driven and teacher guided; putting our children in the driving seat. Engaging quizzes and activities help to hone children’s reading knowledge and skills encourage growth.

STAR reader quizzes are used as a complete online assessment of children’s reading growth. Generating concise reports on screening, benchmarking and student progress to inform planning.

Each Year group will complete these three times during the academic year to assess attainment and progress.

This assessment tool provides an updated book level to enable them to choose a book suited to their ability and to ensure progress continues. Accelerated Reader provides pupils with thousands of book choices (and quizzes to assess understanding) to meet their individual reading needs. This makes sure that readers are well supported, and high achievers are encouraged to read books that really engage and challenge them.

Each pupil has been given their log in details for Accelerated Reader and can access quizzes both at home and in school. Accelerated Reader ensures children have a lifelong love of reading, developing a reading culture in school and at home. The impact is that all children develop a love of reading while raising the reading achievement for children of all abilities.

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Reading for Pleasure

At The Haven school we recognise that the teaching of reading goes way beyond what is taught in our whole-class reading sessions. We aim to inspire a lifelong love of books and for this to be at the heart of our school culture.