Reading

We believe that developing a strong reading culture and supporting our students to become confident readers are essential to their future success. Reading is an integral part of our school day and our students have a daily, timetabled twenty-minute reading session each day.

Throughout their time at The Cowplain School, our students are taken on a carefully researched and planned reading journey (click here for Reading Curriculum Map). Each year, our students read a minimum of three books in Reading Time. The texts have been carefully chosen to support our three curriculum strands: “Thinking Hard, Developing Character and Understanding Diversity” and consist of modern classics, which tackle challenging, thought-provoking themes. Tutors read aloud to students to ensure that they have good reading role models with regards to prosody. Students follow along with the book and complete a comprehension, vocabulary, and inference quiz fortnightly on a Friday.

We have a strong team of Reading Leaders who champion reading across the school and provide targeted support to younger learners whom they read with on a one-to-one basis four times a week in the library.  

We encourage our students to use decoding skills when encountering new, complex words and implement a synthetic phonics programme for Y7 in J, K and L groups and Y8 students in K and L using the Butterfly phonics and the Abigail Steel training programme.

Our enthusiastic readers can take part in the 16 before 16 challenge that encourages them to read sixteen classics and modern classics that have played an important role in shaping modern literature.

Half-termly reading DO NOWs are now embedded in every subject area with students reading a wide range of subject-specific articles.