Reading begins long before children can read words on a page. Strong spoken language provides the foundation for later reading comprehension. 

Across our Nursery and Reception provision, we deliberately develop children's communication, vocabulary, listening and understanding through high-quality interactions, stories, rhymes, songs and talk. We use WellComm to identify language needs early and provide responsive support where needed, alongside our ShREC approach to help adults create rich, purposeful interactions with children. 

Vocabulary and narrative continue to be developed throughout our wider curriculum because what children already know about words and the world has a significant influence on what they can understand when they read. 

Before and alongside learning phonics, children develop an awareness of the sounds within spoken language. 

Children learn to listen carefully to sounds, recognise rhyme and rhythm, hear syllables and begin to identify and manipulate the individual sounds within words. These important foundations prepare children to understand how spoken sounds can be represented by written letters. 

Where children have secured these foundations and are ready, they can begin Nursery Read Write Inc. during the summer term before starting Reception. 

Children need to be able to turn the words they see on the page into spoken language accurately and increasingly automatically. 

We teach phonics systematically and explicitly through Read Write Inc. (RWI) from the beginning of Reception. Children learn the alphabetic code and how to blend sounds together to read words. Once secure they begin to develop an understanding of reading fluency.  

Regular assessment, half-termly and at point of need, allows teachers to identify children who require additional practice quickly. Tutoring and intervention are used responsively so that we aim to keep up rather than catch up. 

Secure decoding provides the essential foundation upon which fluent and successful reading is built. 

Being able to decode a word is not enough. Successful readers need to recognise words accurately and increasingly automatically so that their attention can move from working out the words to understanding what they mean. Fluency is an essential element of our reading curriculum.  

Our fluency teaching develops accuracy, automaticity, expression, rhythm, phrasing and intonation. 

Teachers model fluent reading and children experience approaches including repeated reading, echo reading, choral reading and paired reading. Accuracy is prioritised before speed. 

As children become increasingly fluent, reading becomes less effortful, allowing them to devote more of their attention to understanding and responding to increasingly complex texts. 

Understanding a text depends greatly upon understanding its words and having sufficient knowledge about its context to make sense of its ideas. We have carefully selected a wide range of texts, using our ‘Guiding Principles of Text Selection’ to ensure that we expose our children to a variety of ‘worlds’ through their reading, but we plan and deliver our reading lessons in such as way, through extended and close reads, that these diverse worlds are navigated for our learners.  

As learners need a developed vocabulary to navigate these worlds, vocabulary is explicitly taught within reading lessons and deliberately developed through our wider curriculum. Children encounter ambitious language through high-quality literature, stories, discussion and subject teaching. 

Our knowledge-rich curriculum also helps children build increasingly rich networks of background knowledge. This gives them something to connect new information to when they encounter unfamiliar ideas in their reading. 

The more children know about words and the world, the more they are able to understand when they read. 

Comprehension is the ultimate purpose of reading: understanding, thinking about and responding to what we read. 

Once children have secured the decoding knowledge required to access whole-class reading, they experience CELT's carefully balanced reading diet of fluency, extended reading and close reading. 

Children learn to retrieve and connect information, make inferences, consider vocabulary in context, identify important ideas and explain their thinking using evidence from the text. As they become increasingly proficient, they explore language and authorial choices, consider layers of meaning and recognise that readers can sometimes interpret texts differently. 

Teachers make the thinking of successful readers visible through explicit modelling and 'thinking aloud', before progressively supporting children to use this knowledge and these strategies independently. 

Our ambition is not simply to develop children who can read, but children who choose to read. 

Every child experiences daily story time, giving them regular opportunities to hear high-quality literature read aloud by an expert reader. Weekly Book Talk, author knowledge and visits, recommendations, library experiences and conversations about books help children discover new authors, genres and texts. 

Once children move beyond early reading books, our IPICK approach explicitly teaches them how to select books for themselves by considering Purpose, Interest, Comprehension and Knowledge of the words. 

Children encounter a broad and ambitious literary diet including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, picture books, wordless texts and graphic novels. Texts are carefully selected to provide both mirrors, in which children can recognise aspects of themselves and their experiences, and windows, through which they encounter different lives, cultures, perspectives and experiences. 

Ultimately, we want every CELT child to leave primary school as an accurate, fluent, thoughtful and independent reader: someone with the knowledge and skills to read successfully, and the confidence, curiosity and desire to continue reading throughout their life.