Reading

Reading at Bluecoat C of E Primary School is about learning a life skill and promoting lifelong learning. The skills needed to learn to read are taught with a balance on understanding of the context and plot, phonic skills, word work, punctuation and fluency and phrasing.

Key Focus

Our key focus is on teaching our pupils the skills they need to read and enjoy real books both for pleasure and information; this is encouraged and promoted through weekly school library visits, town library visits, our lunchtime mobile library and a variety of reading clubs such as Quest for Years 5 and 6. We see reading as a holistic to the curriculum and it is interwoven through every area including ICT with our home/school use of the Espresso, Oxford Owl and Nessy websites.

Oxford Reading Tree is used as the core reading scheme to engage our emerging readers from Reception through to the end of Year 2, supplemented by a variety of additional schemes according to pupils learning needs.


From Year 2 onwards, teachers plan and teach Guided Reading for the whole class so that areas of reading, grammar and vocabulary are identified for each session. These areas are explicitly taught through examples of high quality writing. Words are explained through dictionary definitions, pictures, videos and in context with antonyms and synonyms and alternative meanings are also clarified. Lessons begin with retrieval, interpret and author’s choice questions and then follow through with all the lessons required to scaffold the child’s successful reading at the end of the block. All children have the opportunity to practise reading the whole class guided reading text out loud, and they also use APE (answer it, prove it, explain it) to answer questions in detail. Children who are still struggling with decoding skills, in these year groups, will also receive group or 1:1 work with an adult.

At Bluecoat School we see…

Book Band Reading System

Following discussions with parents and carers about our book band reading system, and requests for further information, we thought it would be helpful to explain the system and our age related expectations for reading for the children of Bluecoat School.  

Please be aware that children progress at different rates but if you are concerned please come in and speak to your child’s teacher. To download the Book Band Reading System letter please click on the link below.

Book Band Letter

Other elements we may see…