Learning to Read for Pleasure and Purpose

At Captain Shaw’s, we believe that learning to read is one of the most important things a child will ever do.

Reading opens doors. It allows children to enjoy stories, encounter new people and places, discover knowledge, explore ideas and access every part of our curriculum.

Our ambition is for every child to become a confident, fluent reader who understands what they read and sees themselves as a reader – for both pleasure and purpose.

A Strong Start: Learning to Read

We teach early reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, a systematic synthetic phonics programme.

The foundations begin in Nursery through stories, rhymes, listening, language and oral blending. Formal phonics teaching begins in Reception and follows a carefully sequenced progression through Reception and Year 1, helping children understand how letters and sounds work together so that they can read and spell increasingly independently.

Children also take part in carefully structured reading practice sessions. Books are matched to the sounds children securely know and reading develops three important skills:

Decoding – working out the words
Prosody – reading with fluency, understanding and expression
Comprehension – understanding and thinking about what has been read.

Every Child a Reader

Children learn at different rates. What does not change is our ambition that every child learns to read.

We assess children's reading regularly so that difficulties are identified quickly. If a child needs more practice, we provide additional Keep-up teaching using familiar Little Wandle routines, broken into smaller steps with additional repetition. Where older children still have gaps in their phonic knowledge, targeted catch-up teaching continues for as long as it is needed.

This reflects our approach to inclusion across the school: we maintain high expectations while giving children the teaching, adaptations, time and support they need to succeed.

Reading for Pleasure and Purpose

Learning how to read is the beginning of the journey.

We want children to discover the pleasure of getting lost in a story, laughing at a favourite book, discovering an author they love or sharing a book with somebody else. Children hear adults read every day and encounter a carefully chosen range of books – some which reflect their own lives and community and others which open windows into different worlds, cultures and experiences.

But we also want children to discover the purpose and power of reading.

As they progress through school, reading increasingly enables children to learn independently: to research, investigate, question, compare evidence, encounter different perspectives and acquire knowledge across the curriculum.

Whether enjoying a novel, following instructions to make something, investigating a scientific question or finding evidence about the past, children learn that we read for different reasons and in different ways.

We learn to read – and then we read to learn, discover, imagine and understand.

Evidence Into Practice

We want our teaching to be informed by the best available evidence – and sometimes we have the opportunity to contribute to that evidence too.

Captain Shaw's has taken part in research with the Education Endowment Foundation and schools across the country, including the PALS reading trial, exploring how structured peer-supported approaches can help children develop as readers.

But evidence also has to work for the children in front of us.

Following the trial, we adapted elements of the PALS approach to suit our mixed-age classes and developed the model further so that children could use similar reading strategies with non-fiction as well as fiction texts.

This reflects how we approach improvement at Captain Shaw's: we engage with evidence, consider what it tells us, and use professional judgement to adapt and apply it carefully within our own context.

Reading at Home

Families are important partners in children's reading.

Children learning through Little Wandle take home a decodable book matched to their secure phonic knowledge so that they can practise successfully and build confidence. They also take home books to share and enjoy with their families.

From Nursery and Reception onwards, our home reading records provide a link between home and school, developing as children grow so that they increasingly take responsibility for recording and reflecting on their own reading.

Parents can also access Little Wandle resources explaining how we teach phonics, how children learn to blend and how you can support reading at home. You can access these here.

Our Aim

By the time children leave Captain Shaw’s, we want them to have the fluency and confidence to tackle unfamiliar words and texts, the understanding to make sense of what they read and the curiosity to keep reading.

Above all, we want them to know that reading can give them both pleasure and purpose:

The pleasure to imagine and enjoy;
The purpose to learn, understand and participate in the world around them.