St.Joseph's Catholic
Primary School
"Love one another as I have loved you."
Reading
At St Joseph’s we are passionate about the teaching of reading and aim for all of our pupils to become fluent, confident readers who have a genuine love and interest in reading. We truly believe reading is the key which unlocks the rest of the curriculum and therefore place high importance on this subject area within our curriculum offer.
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We truly value reading at St Joseph's and dedicate a huge part of our day to studying and enjoying texts and are proud to announce we have signed up for the South Yorkshire Reading Guarantee.
Core Story
Each day, children enjoy hearing a story read aloud by their teacher. This time gives all children access to sophisticated themes and literary language without placing literacy demands on them. Teachers and children alike love this part of the school day and the escape into a new world. There is often great discussion over what to read next or requests to 'please keep reading!'
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Reading for Pleasure
At St. Joseph's, we are working hard to foster a love of reading for pleasure and are working with St Wilfred's English Hub to Transform our School's Reading Culture (TSRC). You can read our development plan below.
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Reciprocal Reading
Reciprocal reading Pupils in Key Stage 2 classes are taught reciprocal reading which is timetabled for half hour lessons four times per week. The lessons are progressive and follow a structure to enable pupils to become fluent in the focus text and unpick it in depth in order to develop their reading skills to a high level.
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Day 1 – Clarify
Pupils are introduced to words which have been identified by the teacher from the text as words the pupils may be unfamiliar with. These will often be words from tier 2 and 3 of tiered vocabulary (please see below).
These words are given to the pupils within the sentence and the teacher models using the different strategies below to find the meaning of the word. The pupils are then encouraged to work with their learning partner to find the meaning of other words from the text. Answers are then fed back and discussed.
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Day 2 - Read the text
Pupils take part in a pacey, engaging lesson where they use a range of strategies to read the text with fluency. Through teacher modelling and text marking, children explain their choices for reading and are encouraged to read aloud/perform their reading. ​
Day 3 - Retieval questions
Within this lesson pupils are provided with questions which are ‘find it, put your finger in it’ types of questions. These questions are retrieval questions which pupils can skim and scan the text to find the answer. The teacher may model this skill and pupils will answer a set of questions either independently or with their learning partner. The teacher will provide pupils with a variety of question styles such as sequencing events, find and copy, true or false to apply this skill in a range of contexts.
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Day 4 - Inference questions
On this last lesson within the sequence, the pupils will have become very familiar with the text being covered which will enable them to be more successful at answering more complex questions. On this day, pupils answer ‘look for clues’ questions which require them to dig deeper beyond the surface of the text to interpret it. These questions often require pupils to make a point and support this with evidence from the text. Again the teacher may model this skill as well as ask pupils to work on questions themselves. Once pupils complete this cycle on a piece of text they begin this sequence of lessons again on a different text or part of the text they are reading.
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WORLD BOOK DAY 2023
St Joseph's was a hive of book-loving fun on World Book Day. Children (and staff) dressed up in their favourite book-themed costumes and took part in a whole day of activities. We celebrated the fantastic efforts of costumes and home-made props in assembly and awarded some super book prizes. Each class was then treated to Story Time led by a teacher from another class. We also had a competition across school to decorate each classroom door with their favourite book.
It was a fantastic day with lots of opportunities to share stories, poems, non-fiction and picture books with our friends.
Here are some highlights!
SCHOLASTIC BOOK FAIR 2023
For the first time, St Joseph's hosted a Scholastic Book Fair enabling children to purchase brand new books! For each book sold, school could earn rewards to buy more new books for our classrooms. The fair was a huge success, with school earning 50% of the sales made in rewards to spend! Children have been loving their new books at home and are excited for the new additions in the classroom areas too.
If I were King for a day...
In Partnership with Rawmarsh Library and to celebrate the upcoming Coronation of King Charles III, children in KS2 entered a competition to write a short story, poem or draw a picture to represent what they would do if they were King for a day. The entries and effort from children was incredible. 10 worthy winners were chosen to celebrate a Royal day at the library with activities, games, crafts and a banquet of sweet treats.
Library Visits Summer Term
Each week throughout the summer term, a class has walked to the local library for an afternoon of activities, story telling and a browse of the range of books on offer. The children learnt lots of information about how to use the library including how many books they are allowed to loan and how long they can keep them for. It was a really exciting afternoon for everyone and the children were able to take a library book to loan as well as a letter to sign up if they wished. A huge thank you to Wendy and all the staff at Rawmarsh Library! We can't wait to see you again soon!
