Our Reading Curriculum Overview:  

Newington Green and Rotherfield are committed to delivering an English Curriculum that sparks joy, curiosity and a lifelong love of learning in every child. Driven by Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, we weave the National Curriculum programmes of study into vibrant, thematic units that captivate and inspire pupils. We prioritise pupils’ ability to understand, master, and deploy language, ensuring our pupils progress rapidly from their starting points. While our curriculum content remains consistent across both schools, we honour the unique demographics and individual needs of our pupils by adapting our pedagogical approaches accordingly.   

Intent:   

We passionately believe that reading is the key to learning, allowing pupils to confidently access and engage with the wider school curriculum. Being an enthusiastic, engaged and proficient reader enables a child to unlock opportunities and improves life chances in so many vital areas. Reading is a major driver across our curriculum, within our reading lesson of course, but is also meaningfully embedded in our writing curriculum and foundation subjects. Our aim is for all children to leave our school as lifelong readers, equipped not only with the ability to read fluently but also with a genuine enthusiasm for reading and the ability to critically analyse texts across genres. To achieve this, we are committed to immersing our pupils in a diverse array of high-quality texts, providing opportunities for them to develop skills such as making meaningful connections, drawing insightful inferences and using prior knowledge to improve their understanding of the text. Closing the vocabulary gap is a core element of our pedagogy and vocabulary is taught, clarified and utilised in a consistent and meaningful way to increase pupils’ knowledge and understanding of words and instil in them the confidence to use them. These texts should be both ‘a mirror and a window’ so that children see themselves represented and reflected and, alongside this, learn about the world outside of their own experience. Outside of the classroom, we are focused as a school on developing our culture of Reading for Pleasure. We are building a community of readers which includes all pupils and families alongside the staff in the school. We want to enable children to find their own reading identity and be filled with the joy, curiosity and fulfilment that a deep love of reading can engender.  

Reading Policy: RF Reading Policy January 2025.docx 

WCGR unit overview: WCGR Curriculum Map.xlsx