Our Reading Curriculum

At Goffs Oak Primary, we want every child to become a confident, thoughtful and enthusiastic reader who can enjoy books, understand what they read and talk about texts with confidence.

From Autumn term 2 of Year 2 through to Year 6, our whole-class reading lessons are called Reflective Reading. These lessons are based on the Reading Leaves approach from Literacy Tree and have been carefully adapted to fit our school's reading curriculum and priorities.

What is Reflective Reading?

Reflective Reading is a 30-minute whole-class reading lesson designed to explicitly teach the skills and knowledge children need to become successful readers.

Each lesson uses a carefully selected, high-quality text or extract as the stimulus for reading. Through teacher modelling, discussion and carefully planned questioning, children are supported to think deeply about what they have read.

Our Reflective Reading lessons cover the full range of reading skills and National Curriculum objectives, including:

• Vocabulary – exploring new and interesting words and developing a rich vocabulary.
• Retrieval – finding and recalling information from the text.
• Inference – using clues from the text and what we already know to work out meaning.
• Prediction – thinking about what might happen next and justifying our ideas.
• Summarising – identifying the most important information and ideas.
• Authorial choices – exploring why an author has chosen particular words, phrases or structures.
• Themes and ideas – considering the bigger messages, themes and concepts within a text.
• Comparison – making connections between characters, texts, ideas and authors.
• Response and discussion – sharing, explaining and justifying our thoughts about what we have read.

Importantly, Reflective Reading is not simply about answering questions. Children are encouraged to think, talk, explain, justify and reflect on what they are reading.

Our Reading Leaves

Our Reflective Reading curriculum is rooted in the Reading Leaves approach from Literacy Tree.

Reading Leaves provides a structured framework for developing children's reading comprehension through rich, engaging texts. It brings together the different aspects of comprehension and encourages children to become increasingly independent in how they approach and respond to texts.

We use this framework to ensure that children experience a broad and varied diet of reading, while systematically developing the knowledge, vocabulary and comprehension skills they need as they move through school.

We have renamed these lessons Reflective Reading to reflect our own school approach and our belief that reading is about more than simply understanding the words on a page. We want children to become reflective readers who question, make connections, consider different viewpoints and develop their own responses to what they read.

Reading for Pleasure

Alongside our daily reading curriculum, we place a strong emphasis on reading for pleasure.

Children are given regular opportunities to choose and enjoy books, listen to stories and poems, share recommendations and talk about authors and texts. We want children to develop a genuine love of reading and to see themselves as readers.

We believe that every child deserves access to great books and the opportunity to discover the joy of reading.