SUBJECTSEnglish, Read Write Inc.
& Royal Shakespeare Company

We strongly believe that reading is the key to a child’s emotional, cultural, intellectual, social and spiritual development. It enables children to build a knowledge base that can forever be added to and even challenged, the more they read. To foster a child’s love of reading is to equip them with the power to fully engage with the world around them and even escape into another world entirely!

Our priority when the children start with us is to build the children’s spoken language, and to explore making marks using a range of tools. We use the well-established Read Write Inc. Phonics programme to teach the children all the sounds they need in order to read and ensure that the children read at school every day, as well as at home. Of equal importance is reading daily to our children, even when they can read fluently themselves. By reading literature to children that is at their interest level but beyond their reading ability, we can further stretch their understanding and motivate them to develop their listening and language skills. As the children become more fluent in their reading, they can then start to take real meaning from it, inferring and deducing information with more and more complicated books as they progress through the school.

How can you support your child with reading at home?

Knowing how to support your child with their reading at home is something we want to support you with. Reading fluently is something we all want for our children and so the more practise your child can have at home as well as at school, the more fluent a reader they will be! Below are some video examples of how parents read with their children: a child from year 2 and a child from year 6.

Please do take the time to watch these videos and as always, get in touch if you would like any more support!

Stay tuned for more videos coming soon!

St. Paul’s is also connected to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) as a Lead Associate School. We appreciate that many people’s initial experience of Shakespeare’s works was a negative one. This is something we strive to ensure never happens for any of the children who come to St. Paul’s. Shakespeare’s plays are exposed to the children right from the very beginning of their time with us, through a range of active learning approaches that allow the children to explore language in a deeper way.