Our ambition at Botwell House Catholic School is to encourage and guide our students towards becoming confident, inquisitive and independent readers who can challenge themselves. We teach them to read with accuracy, fluency and understanding whilst embedding a love of books and reading in each child.

The reading programme at Botwell House is broad and balanced. It is well planned and taught through various means, including but not limited to, shared and guided reading, home reading, individualised and independent reading.

When reading with the children, we use different reading strategies to check understanding and encourage critical thinking, such as decoding, predicting, retelling, inferencing and questioning.

In Early Years and Infants, our reading programme is heavily supported by Read Write Inc phonics, as the children use the learned sounds and skills to help decode new words.

In KS2 the children are encouraged to read a wide variety of genres to broaden their understanding. Reading progress is assessed regularly, mainly through the PM scheme, and our teaching then adapted to suit the needs of the children based on our findings.

Please see below for more information about how this is being implemented within our school....