Reading
At Whiston Worrygoose, reading is at the heart of our curriculum. We are proud to be an English Hub and Little Wandle Champion School, giving us first-hand access to the latest research and innovation in early reading. Our aim is for every child to become a confident, fluent, and enthusiastic reader, with a lifelong love of reading that extends across subjects and into everyday life.
We place high-quality texts at the core of learning, reflecting and celebrating the diverse cultures within our school community. Reading underpins writing and supports understanding across all foundation subjects, enabling pupils to access, explore, and deepen knowledge throughout the curriculum. Our approach ensures that reading is not only a skill to master but also a source of curiosity, imagination, and enjoyment.
For more information about our role as an English Hub and Little Wandle Champion School, please follow the links below.
INTENT
Our intent is to develop readers who are confident, curious, and capable of engaging with a wide range of texts. Pupils are supported to:
-
Build strong foundations in phonics, ensuring confident decoding and fluency from the earliest stages.
-
Develop comprehension skills, understanding, interpreting, and responding to texts across genres.
-
Encounter rich, diverse literature that broadens their understanding of themselves, their community, and the world.
-
Use reading to enhance language development, writing, and thinking across the curriculum.
We aim for pupils to leave Whiston Worrygoose as confident, independent readers who can navigate texts with fluency, understand nuanced meaning, and make connections across subjects and life experiences.
IMPLEMENTATION
Reading is taught through a coherent, progressive curriculum that blends a mastery approach to phonics with structured comprehension and guided reading sessions. In Early Years and Key Stage 1, pupils follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds programme, ensuring systematic, high-quality phonics instruction, reinforced through levelled reading texts and targeted interventions.
Across the school, reading lessons combine whole-class and small-group approaches, enabling pupils to practise decoding, develop prosody, and engage in rich discussions about texts. High-quality model texts are chosen deliberately to support the curriculum, inspire curiosity, and reflect a range of voices and experiences.
Story time, class libraries, and phase libraries are embedded throughout the school, ensuring pupils have access to a wide range of fiction and non-fiction texts. Reading is further reinforced across subjects, with pupils applying vocabulary, comprehension, and inferential skills in writing, science, history, geography, and beyond. Teachers use ongoing assessment, questioning, and immediate feedback to scaffold learning, challenge advanced readers, and support those requiring additional practice.
IMPACT
As a result of this approach, pupils at Whiston Worrygoose:
-
Develop fluency, confidence, and independence as readers, applying these skills across the curriculum.
-
Gain a love of reading and engagement with texts that reflect a variety of cultures, experiences, and perspectives.
-
Demonstrate strong comprehension, critical thinking, and vocabulary acquisition, enabling them to communicate effectively in writing and discussion.
-
Are well prepared for the next stage of education, equipped with the skills, knowledge, and enthusiasm to access increasingly challenging texts and ideas.
Reading at Whiston Worrygoose is not simply taught—it is lived across the school, inspiring curiosity, imagination, and a deep, lifelong engagement with literature.
