Reading At Wingfield Academy
Here at Wingfield Academy, our reading strategy is designed to ensure that every child becomes a confident, fluent reader while also developing a lifelong love of books and storytelling. Through high-quality teaching, targeted intervention, and a rich reading culture, we support all pupils to achieve success in reading.
For children who require additional support, we provide carefully planned intervention programmes that focus on key reading skills such as phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary development. These sessions are tailored to individual needs, enabling pupils to close gaps in learning, build confidence, and make strong progress.
Alongside intervention support, we actively promote reading for pleasure across the school. Children are encouraged to explore a wide range of high-quality texts, authors, and genres through class reading areas, library sessions, story times, and reading events. By creating positive reading experiences and celebrating books, we aim to inspire enthusiastic, independent readers who enjoy reading both in school and at home.
Our approach ensures that all pupils, regardless of starting point, are supported to become successful readers with the skills and motivation to thrive.
Literacy At Wingfield Academy
Our whole-school literacy strategy is designed to develop confident communicators, readers, and writers across all year groups and curriculum areas. Through a consistent and progressive approach, we ensure that pupils continually build and strengthen their written, verbal, and foundational literacy skills throughout their time in school.
High-quality teaching of speaking, listening, reading, writing, vocabulary, spelling, and grammar is embedded across the curriculum, enabling pupils to apply their literacy skills in a wide range of meaningful contexts. Staff use shared strategies and consistent expectations to support pupils in developing confidence, accuracy, and independence in communication.
Targeted support and intervention are provided for pupils who require additional help to secure key foundational skills. This ensures that gaps are identified early and addressed effectively, allowing all children to access learning successfully and make sustained progress.
Oracy is also a key element of our literacy strategy. Pupils are encouraged to express ideas clearly, engage in discussion, and develop confidence when speaking to different audiences. Through rich language experiences, purposeful writing opportunities, and exposure to high-quality texts, we foster a culture where literacy is valued and celebrated across the school.
Our literacy strategy equips pupils with the essential skills they need to succeed academically, communicate effectively, and become confident lifelong learners.
Literacy in the Classroom
Strand 1 – Think it:
This involves the deliberate provision of time for pupils to consider their responses, whether recalling information, constructing an answer, or applying new knowledge. Allowing this thinking time reinforces the importance of reflection and contemplation as key learning skills, supporting pupils in developing more confident, accurate, and considered responses.
Strand 2 – Say it:
This involves the support, maintenance, and encouragement of high standards in all oral contributions within lessons. It includes the purposeful use of opportunities to develop pupils’ familiarity with disciplinary literacy through spoken demonstration, valuing the sharing of ideas and the collaborative construction of responses through discussion. This is supported through planned opportunities for talk, debate, and regular intervals for feedback within lessons, underpinned by the use of sentence stems, key vocabulary, and clearly displayed success criteria to guide and scaffold effective oral contributions.
Strand 3 – Read it:
This involves the provision of strategies that support all pupils in accessing and understanding written texts. Staff are provided with access to relevant reading data, enabling them to make informed decisions about how best to support pupils on their reading journey. Strategies may include the use of glossaries, opportunities to explore root words, breaking texts down through summaries, and structured opportunities for pupils to synthesise information to deepen their understanding.
Strand 4 – Write it:
This involves the provision of approaches that support pupils in presenting their ideas effectively in written form across all subject areas, with the aim of developing independent learners over time. Support may include the use of shared structural approaches, acronyms to remind pupils of key components of effective writing, word banks to support subject-specific content and vocabulary, and the explicit sharing of success criteria. These approaches ensure that pupils clearly understand what is required for their written work to be successful.
