At Fallings Park we strongly believe that reading is fun and purposeful and that children learn best when their wellbeing is prioritised. We strive to provide all our pupils with high quality opportunities to both ‘learn to read’ and ‘read to learn.’ We give our pupils access to a wide range of texts including those that represent our diverse community, class novels, magazines, library books, and supplement their reading using online texts. We recognise the importance of ‘Parents as partners,’ and encourage our families to ‘read to’ and ‘read with’ their children at home regularly and record this in their reading journal. We teach Phonics using the Essential Letters and Sounds Synthetic Phonics Programme (ELS) and reading books are aligned with this programme to give pupils opportunities to practise and apply sounds at the point of teaching. Dedicated time is given to teaching Phonics on a daily basis in the Early Years and Key Stage 1 and continues into Year 2 where necessary. We strive to provide our pupils with opportunities to create high quality pieces of Writing. This occurs following a structured sequence of reading, skills practise, drafting and editing. Stimuli are chosen carefully from a range of sources including off site visits, classic children’s texts, film, notable authors, plus other cross curricular links to inspire and engage our pupils. Vocabulary is a key focus in our teaching of writing, and we consistently expose our pupils to a language rich curriculum right from the very beginning of their school journey.