At Springdale, reading is at the heart of our curriculum. We believe the greatest gift we can give our learners is the love of reading. We therefore strive to ensure that every child leaves us not only with the ability to read easily, fluently and with good understanding, but with a real passion for books. We want them all to read for pleasure, having had access to a wide range of text types, genres and authors so that they can make informed opinions about their favourite texts.

We want our children to read with confidence and accuracy for a variety of purposes and audiences whilst developing their own individual flair. We expose our children to a wide range of vocabulary so they can decipher new words and use them when speaking both informally and formally. We aim for our children to apply their reading skills across all areas of the curriculum. We believe that learning to read is one of the most important skills that any child will learn whilst at school. Everything else depends on it, so we put all our effort into making sure that every single child learns to read and then applies this to writing through meaningful everyday activities. 

Our aims are to enable children to:

1. Develop positive attitudes to reading that ensure reading is an enjoyable and meaningful experience.

2. Use reading as a fundamental part of all curriculum planning and development as a tool to acquire   information.

3. Develop a range of reading strategies that allow children to tackle reading problems and the wider curriculum with confidence.   

4. Read and respond to a variety of texts, whilst developing an increased level of fluency and independence.

5. Broaden their vocabulary, acquire an understanding of grammar and knowledge of language.

To help foster a love of literature and encourage exposure to a variety of genres, we are proud to introduce our new whole school reading initiative, Book Bingo. Like the game of Bingo, the aim is to complete the board, only this board is made up of different text types and reading criteria as opposed to numbers. Once the children have read a set number of books, they will receive a raffle ticket. Their name will then go into a prize draw, which will be chosen by Miss Budden at the end of each half term. The more the children read, the more raffle tickets they will earn, the more chance they will have of winning a prize.

Raffle Tickets

1 Line = 1 raffle ticket

Full House = 5 raffle tickets

Every time your child completes a new line on their board, they need to tell their teacher who will then check and reward them with 1 raffle ticket in the draw. If your child completes the whole board, they will receive 5 raffle tickets. Once completed, the board begins again, and the children will be expected to read different books for each genre. Please track the books your child has read by recording the titles on the Bingo board, along with the date. The Bingo boards will be kept in your child's reading record.

For our early readers, we appreciate that they are still developing their reading skills and will not be able to access all these texts independently. We would still love for the children to experience the different genres but appreciate these will be part of a shared story time rather than an independent read. Where possible we would love for the children to read to you, so choosing books (within the specified genres) at an appropriate level would be beneficial.