Reading

Reading at Lady Lumley’s

Tutor Read

We run a Tutor Read program for all students in Years 7-11. Each year group has been allocated two different books over the year. The students all have copies of the books, which are kept in their tutor rooms. Their tutor reads to them twice a week, with students following in their own copies, and with occasional visits from ‘guest speakers’ from our sixth form. The books we have selected will raise interesting discussions as the characters they describe come from a range of backgrounds, cultures and life experiences.

In school and in life, reading is a fundamental part of learning about the world and provides us with an insight into new experiences and ideas. Reading in tutor and having the space and time as a reading community to discuss some of the issues and experiences we encounter helps promote reading for pleasure and enjoyment.

Students are also making real connections to their ‘Life’ lessons in school. Reading will help build students’ ‘cultural literacy’ and for our students who don’t read much outside of school, we hope that this will lead them to find a way of engaging more with reading for pleasure and hopefully find the right book for them.

We hope students enjoy reading these books in tutor time, and that this will lead many of them to look for similar titles or works by the same author either through our school library or online through E-Platform.

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Year 7	Year 8	Year 9	Year 10	Year 11

Reading across the curriculum at Lady Lumley’s
We focus a great deal in lessons on helping students understand and make better use of higher level, academic vocabulary in their speaking and writing across all aspects of the curriculum. This is key to their success at school, and developing a wider vocabulary is obviously a crucial part of accessing reading, in particular academic texts that students read every day across all their lessons.

 

Read First
At the start of every new topic or module of work, we engage students with the new topic through a challenging text which links the subject or topic they are studying to the real world. We practise a range of reading strategies; scanning, summarising, working out new vocabulary, to access challenging reading material. Students will be completing a Read First text in each subject once per half term, or once a term for subjects where they have fewer lessons.

 

Reading for Enrichment

As well as continuing to help students improve their reading skills and strategies so they can have the best possible outcomes at GCSE and A-level, we also want to provide more opportunities for students to engage in wider reading across their school subjects. We are encouraging students to engage in reading more around subjects, whether this be in the form of books, magazine publications, podcasts, video links and so on. This is done as part of the lesson content itself, or it may be set as home learning, or preparation material for a future lesson. We hope that this will allow students to deepen their understanding of the subjects and topics they are studying in school as well as continuing to improve their reading skills on an academic level. Ultimately, we hope that wider reading will help our students to develop more academic independence and develop effective research skills which can be applied to work and academic life beyond school.

Our library

We have a fantastic and experienced librarian: Donna Rueth, who works closely with staff and students to improve our library provision for students both in terms of fiction, non-fiction, and texts which link more closely to the different curriculum areas.

Our librarian meets with KS3 groups, and partners with the English department to support their work throughout the school, particularly around the use of E-Platform in and out of school. The fiction section in the library is arranged by genre in order to help students find books that appeal to them. The non-fiction section is continually being updated to ensure there are books in the library that allow our students to gain a deeper understanding of their different subject areas.

 

Our key aim of the library is to promote reading for pleasure and celebrate the many benefits of it, including:

• an increase in vocabulary
• stronger skills in spelling and maths,
• increased empathy
• improvement in relationships with others
• reduction of the symptoms of depression
• improvement of general wellbeing

One of our aims of the library is that it will offer a safe space for students and that we will see an improvement in academics and social skills, as a result of their engagement with literature.

 

Faster Read

Faster Read is an exciting and innovative reading scheme that has been proven to improve students' reading and comprehension skills.  The programme is a dynamic way to approach the teaching of a fictional text.  The process involves reading aloud and at a faster pace in a sustained and uninterrupted way, with stopping points to develop and engage students' involvement with, and reactions to, a text.  This scheme is currently being embedded within Year 7 English.

 

Reading Interventions

We are working in collaboration with ‘Thinking Reading’ to provide accelerated reading support for a small number of our students who have difficulties in accessing reading material in lessons.  Delivered in 1:1 sessions, this intervention is targeted at students across Years 7-10 with a reading age two years or more below chronological age. Thinking Reading has been valuable in supporting students to make accelerated progress, ‘close the gap’ and achieve a reading age in line with their chronological age.

A small number of Year 7 and 8 students access Lexia sessions.  This is a literacy intervention with specific support in the areas of reading, vocabulary, grammar and comprehension.  This online intervention offers personalised support based on individual strengths and weaknesses, supporting students in developing the foundations needed to develop more complex reading skills and to develop the comprehension skills required to fully access and engage in the curriculum.

Those students experiencing the most significant difficulty with reading have access to the ‘Active Literacy Kit’ and ‘Yes, We Can Read’, a phonics-based reading intervention, delivered 1:1.

Support for SEND pupils across the curriculum in terms of reading involves support with decoding through a greater emphasis on teachers reading aloud where appropriate, explicit teaching of vocabulary to support comprehension and develop background knowledge, and use of key strategies to support access to a text.