Our Curriculum
At Parkside, we believe that reading is a vital skill which is central to pupils accessing the full curriculum. As a result, all teachers are teachers of reading. We ensure that our pupils are taught to read with fluency, accuracy, automaticity and understanding through a variety of discrete and cross-curricular learning opportunities. Above all, we want children in our school to become confident, enthusiastic, independent and reflective readers.
We achieve our aim through a mixture of whole-school use of Accelerated Reader, whole-school rewards and motivation, exemplary English teaching, a dedicated Reading curriculum and the use of a variety of reading interventions to ensure that accelerated progress is made by those pupils who require additional support.
Accelerated Reader
Accelerated Reader (AR) is a powerful tool for monitoring and managing independent reading practice. At Parkside, we adopt the use and promotion of AR across the school by ensuring that every teacher has a role in its successful implementation and pupils are encouraged to read through regular prizes and incentives. Some of these include tokens for our reading vending machine, prizes for word millionaires, competitions run through our school library and the linking of reading to our House Point system in school.
Based on each student's independent reading level, AR helps teachers set personalised goals for each pupil, and guide pupils to books that are difficult enough to keep them challenged, but not so difficult as to cause frustration. In addition, AR helps teachers monitor pupils' vocabulary growth, literacy skills development, and other reading skills.
Interventions
Occasionally, pupils will require additional support in their reading when they join us in Year 5, to ensure that they are able to understand texts at an appropriate age-related reading level. We identify and address this need early, and use two programmes to help pupils.
In addition to the above programmes we also employ the following to support children with their reading.
Home Support
Parents can track and monitor their child’s reading quizzes and progress using Accelerated Reader Home Connect.
