Reading At Oyster Park Primary School

At Oyster Park, we aim to nurture a lifelong love of reading by providing pupils with the skills, strategies, and attitudes they need to read for enjoyment and understanding. We believe that every child should have access to high-quality literature throughout their time with us, regardless of ability.

How We Inspire a Love of Reading

Daily Story Time: Across the school, children enjoy daily story sessions where teachers share exciting stories and adventures.

Engaging Resources:

KS1: Our Magic of Reading Boxes help children make connections between books and authors.

KS2: We use Class Readers during Story Time to expose pupils to a variety of authors, poetry, and narrative styles.
This approach extends vocabulary, deepens comprehension, and supports writing development.

Reading Across Year Groups

Early Years:

Daily discrete phonics sessions using Read Write Inc (RWI).

Listening skills taught from Nursery, progressing to segmenting and blending in Reception.

Children learn book handling, story structure, and character understanding through shared reading.

Key Stage One:

Continued daily phonics using RWI.

Regular opportunities to apply phonics knowledge in reading and writing.

Shared reading in Year 1 develops fluency, prosody, and vocabulary.

Key Stage Two:

Four Guided Reading sessions weekly (Years 2–6) to embed core reading skills.

Weekly comprehension lessons using a range of texts, short films, and animations.

Lessons focus on question types, interpretation, and vocabulary development.

Research-Informed Practice

Our reading strategies are informed by research, including Chris Such’s Primary Reading Simplified, ensuring evidence-based approaches to fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary development.

Parental Partnership

We value parental involvement in reading.

Workshops: Parents are invited to learn how we teach reading, including live demonstrations.

Home Reading Initiatives: We encourage reading at home through school-wide programs and resources.

If you have any queries, require any support, advice or guidance in relation to reading please contact the school office where you will be put in contact with a member of the reading team.

Early Reading

At Oyster Park Primary Academy, we recognise the importance of children developing early reading skills and an early love of reading. We believe reading opens up a new world for children and gives them the opportunity to explore new ideas, visit new places, meet new characters and develop a better understanding of other cultures. Reading is a key life skill and we strive to embed a culture of reading into the core of what we do.

In our Early Years classrooms we have a wealth of books and provide a wide range of opportunities to develop pupils’ early language skills. In Early Years we teach discrete phonics sessions daily using the Read Write Inc (RWI) programme. Children are taught listening skills from Nursery and the skill of segmenting and blending orally, these skills are then built upon as they develop new phonic skills in Reception.

They are given opportunities to apply these in the context of reading and writing. They are also taught how to handle books. They learn that all print carries meaning and begin to develop an understanding of story structure and characters through adults enthusiastically sharing and discussing books.

Our Early Years reading environments are attractive and inviting, they entice pupils to engage in the reading provision promoting a love of reading. Pupils in our Early Years develop their language rapidly. This is achieved through our environments being communication friendly spaces.

The links below provide excellent resources to support the development of early language, communication and reading skills.