Reading At St Agnes
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” — Dr. Seuss
Intent
At St Agnes, we intend for our reading curriculum to foster a lifelong love of literature while equipping every child with the essential skills to become fluent, critical, and confident readers. Building upon the strong foundations of our Early Years and Key Stage 1 phonics programme, Little Wandle, our reading curriculum seamlessly transitions children into deeper comprehension and text analysis.
Our curriculum is designed to:
Bridge the transition from phonics to advanced comprehension from Year 2 onwards using a structured, explicit skills-based approach.
Expand vocabulary and remove word-level barriers through targeted pre-teaching and rich language immersion.
Develop key reading domains—including retrieval, inference, word meaning, summarising, and prediction—to build independent, reflective readers.
Foster genuine reading for pleasure by exposing children to carefully curated reading spines that encompass a rich variety of genres, diverse voices, and classic to contemporary literature.
Enhance background knowledge and cultural capital by making meaningful cross-curricular links and paired text connections.
Implementation
Once children complete their phonics journey in Year 2, our whole-class reading teaching is powered by the Complete Comprehension programme. Parallel to explicit skill instruction, we cultivate a rich reading culture through our bespoke Reading Spines.
Each child will:
Experience explicit comprehension instruction: Teaching units systematically model individual reading skills (such as inference and retrieval) before children apply them independently.
Engage with Language Toolkits: Every unit incorporates explicit vocabulary pre-teaching to unlock complex texts and close word gaps.
Explore Paired Texts & Themes: Children engage with extracts linked by author, genre, or cross-curricular topics—deepening background knowledge and critical thinking through text comparison.
Access a Diverse Reading Spine: Outside of discrete comprehension lessons, children are regularly read to and given daily opportunities to explore books from our carefully selected class reading spines, which highlight different genres, cultures, and formats.
Our teaching sequence:
Pre-teaches essential vocabulary and builds contextual background before diving into a text extract.
Models metacognitive reading strategies, showing pupils how skilled readers think, question, and make connections.
Provides targeted skill practice alongside mixed retrieval and reasoning questions to prepare children for higher-level reading demands.
Encourages choice and agency, ensuring every child finds books that captivate their imagination and nurture their personal interests.
Impact
Through our reading curriculum, children will:
Read with confidence, fluency, and deep understanding across a broad range of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Master the core comprehension domains, demonstrating progress year-on-year in their ability to infer, retrieve, summarise, and evaluate texts.
Express a rich, varied vocabulary that supports their learning right across the wider curriculum.
Develop a genuine, lifelong love of reading, identifying themselves as readers and discovering genres and authors that spark their passion.