Reading

Our Reading Vision

Dream • Believe • Achieve

Our Vision for Reading

At Meadow View Academy, we believe that reading is the gateway to learning. It enables our children to dream beyond their own experiences, believe in themselves as confident and capable readers, and achieve across the curriculum and throughout their lives.

Our ambition is for every child to leave Meadow View as a fluent, confident and enthusiastic reader who can read with understanding, think deeply about texts and, most importantly, develop a genuine love of books and reading.

Reading is at the heart of our curriculum and our school community. We recognise that learning to read is one of the most important things a child will ever do. Therefore, we are committed to ensuring that every child, regardless of their starting point, receives the teaching, support, challenge and opportunities they need to become a successful reader.

Developing Fluent Readers – The Christopher Such Approach

Our approach to reading is influenced by the work of Christopher Such and the principle that successful reading comprehension is built upon secure word recognition, strong language comprehension, fluency and a growing body of knowledge.

We understand that reading is much more than answering comprehension questions. Children need to be able to decode words accurately, develop automaticity, read with appropriate pace and expression, understand increasingly sophisticated vocabulary and build the knowledge needed to make sense of what they read.

For this reason, fluency is central to our approach. Teachers explicitly model fluent reading and children are given regular opportunities to hear high-quality reading and practise through strategies such as echo reading, choral reading, repeated reading and partner reading. We teach children to consider accuracy, pace, phrasing, expression and prosody so that their reading increasingly sounds natural and supports understanding.

Vocabulary is taught explicitly and in context. Teachers identify words that may present a barrier to understanding and explore their meaning, use and impact within a text. Through carefully chosen, high-quality texts, children also continually build their background knowledge, enabling them to make increasingly meaningful connections between what they already know and what they read.

Our Seven-Day Reading Cycle

Across Meadow View, our guided reading approach follows a carefully structured seven-day reading cycle. Wherever appropriate, the text used for guided reading is closely connected to the high-quality text being explored within English, allowing children to become immersed in literature and develop a deep understanding of the text, its vocabulary, themes and characters.

Our seven areas of focus are:

Day 1 – Fluency, Decoding and Prosody: Children develop accuracy, automaticity, pace, phrasing and expression through teacher modelling, echo reading, choral reading and repeated reading.

Day 2 – Vocabulary and Authorial Choice: Children explore unfamiliar and ambitious vocabulary and consider why an author has chosen particular words and phrases.

Day 3 – Prediction: Children use evidence from the text alongside their existing knowledge to make sensible and increasingly sophisticated predictions.

Day 4 – Summarising: Children identify the most important information within a text and learn to distinguish key ideas from supporting detail.

Day 5 – Inference: Children learn to read beyond what is explicitly stated, using evidence to infer characters' thoughts, feelings, motives and actions.

Day 6 – Comparison: Children make connections and comparisons between characters, events, themes, language and, as they progress through school, different texts and authors.

Day 7 – Applying Our Reading Skills: Children apply the knowledge and strategies developed throughout the cycle to a range of comprehension questions, including age-appropriate SATs-style questions.

Each session follows a consistent structure of Retrieval, My Turn, Our Turn, Your Turn and Review. This enables teachers to revisit previous learning, explicitly model the reading process, practise alongside pupils, gradually release responsibility and provide children with opportunities to apply their learning independently.

Reading for Every Child

We have high expectations for every reader at Meadow View. Our reading curriculum is designed to ensure that all children can access ambitious texts while receiving the support they need to succeed.

Teachers carefully consider the needs of their lowest attaining readers and adapt texts, vocabulary, questioning and activities where appropriate, without lowering expectations of what children can achieve. Children who require additional support with decoding continue to receive systematic phonics teaching alongside opportunities to participate meaningfully in wider reading experiences.

This ensures that children are not excluded from rich stories, vocabulary and discussion simply because they are at an earlier stage of learning to decode.

Early Reading and Read Write Inc.

In EYFS and Key Stage 1, early reading is taught systematically through Read Write Inc. Phonics. Children learn the sounds they need to decode unfamiliar words and are given frequent opportunities to practise these skills until reading becomes increasingly fluent and automatic.

Children take home a carefully matched Read Write Inc. Book Bag Book and are also allocated an appropriate core phonics text through Oxford Owl. As these texts are deliberately matched to children's developing phonic knowledge, we encourage children to reread them several times. Repeated reading develops accuracy, fluency, confidence and expression and allows children to increasingly focus on understanding and enjoying what they read.

Children who continue to require phonics teaching as they progress through school receive the support they need while also accessing the rich reading curriculum and reading experiences enjoyed by their peers.

Reading Beyond the Classroom

We want reading to be part of children's lives, not simply something that happens during a lesson. Throughout the school day, children experience stories, poems, non-fiction and a wide range of high-quality texts.

Story time remains an important part of our school day. It gives every child the opportunity to simply enjoy a book, hear an expert reader model fluent and expressive reading and discover authors, characters and worlds they may not otherwise encounter.

Home reading is an important part of this partnership. Alongside appropriately matched reading books, children have opportunities to choose books for enjoyment and share these with their families. We encourage parents and carers to talk about books, revisit favourite stories and make reading a positive and enjoyable part of everyday family life.

Our New School Library

The new academic year marks an exciting chapter in reading at Meadow View with the opening of our new school library.

Our children will create their own personalised bookmarks, complete with an individual barcode, enabling them to borrow books from the library. Classes have designated library time each week where children can browse, share, discuss and choose books before taking them home to enjoy.

Our aim is for the library to become much more than a room filled with books. We want it to be at the heart of our reading community: a welcoming and inspiring space where children can explore their interests, discover new authors and experience the pleasure of choosing a book simply because they want to read it.

Mrs Lewis, alongside other members of staff, has worked extremely hard to prepare this exciting new space for our children, and we are delighted that it is now becoming part of their weekly reading experience.

Celebrating the National Year of Reading

Throughout 2026, the National Year of Reading has provided us with an exciting opportunity to celebrate reading across the whole school. Each month, we have created a different experience designed to place books, stories and reading at the centre of school life.

January – Reading Badges
We launched our Reading Badge challenge, encouraging children to celebrate regular reading at home. Children could work towards Bronze for 100 reads, Silver for 200 reads and Gold for 300 reads, providing an exciting way to recognise commitment to reading.

February – The Great Reading Swap
Staff swapped year groups for a special story time, giving children the opportunity to hear stories read by different adults from across the school. It was a wonderful way to bring our school community together through books and demonstrate that reading belongs to everyone.

March – World Book Day: Oliver Twist
For World Book Day, Meadow View was transported into the world of Oliver Twist. Our celebrations culminated in a very special staff pantomime, bringing the story to life for our children and creating a memorable shared reading experience for the whole school.

April – Poet Visit
We welcomed poet Attie Lime to Meadow View. The visit gave our children the opportunity to experience poetry in an exciting and engaging way, helping them to see reading and writing as something creative, expressive and alive.

May – The Book Bus
The Book Bus visited Meadow View, giving children the exciting experience of browsing and choosing from a huge selection of books. Through the event, we raised over £400 in commission towards books for our new school library, helping our children directly contribute to building the reading environment they now enjoy.

June – Mystery Reader
Our families became part of the celebration through Mystery Reader. Parents and carers were invited into school during story time to surprise classes by sharing a favourite story. This strengthened the connection between reading at home and reading at school while showing children that reading is valued by our whole community.

July – The Great Reading Picnic
We finished the academic year with The Great Reading Picnic. Children came together with blankets and favourite books to enjoy reading in a relaxed, social environment. It was a wonderful celebration of everything we had achieved and, most importantly, of reading for pleasure.

A New Academic Year – A New Chapter

Our National Year of Reading journey continues into the new academic year, beginning with the opening of our new school library.

Children have already returned to school surrounded by books. They are being introduced to exciting new texts within English, becoming immersed in these texts through guided reading, and our younger children are beginning the year with carefully matched phonics books.

The opening of our library builds upon everything we achieved during the previous academic year and reflects our long-term commitment to creating a sustainable culture of reading across Meadow View.

Creating Readers for Life

Ultimately, our vision extends far beyond children being able to answer questions about a text or achieve well in statutory assessments. We want children to understand the power and pleasure of reading.

We want them to experience the excitement of discovering a new author, the comfort of returning to a favourite story, the curiosity created by a fascinating fact and the opportunity to see the world through somebody else's eyes.

Through systematic phonics, explicit fluency teaching, rich vocabulary instruction, carefully structured comprehension, high-quality texts, regular story time, our new library and a whole-school culture that celebrates books, we aim to give every child the tools and the desire to become a reader.

At Meadow View Academy, we want every child to Dream through books, Believe in themselves as readers and Achieve through reading.