Reading

Reading at Grange

At Grange, reading is a central part of our curriculum. We aim to develop confident, enthusiastic readers who can understand, discuss and enjoy a wide range of texts.

Our reading lessons focus strongly on comprehension skills, helping children to think deeply about what they read and explain their ideas clearly.

Guided Reading

In Key Stage 2, children take part in whole-class guided reading sessions three times a week. Each session lasts around 40 minutes and is structured to build key reading skills.

Lessons include:

• A short ERIC starter activity

• Explicit teaching of a specific reading skill

• Time for discussion, review and reflection

Texts used in lessons are often linked to the class English unit or a high-quality core text.

ERIC Reading Skills

We teach comprehension using four key reading domains known as ERIC:

Explain
Children explain ideas, vocabulary and the author’s message.

Retrieve
Children find information directly from the text.

Interpret
Children use clues and evidence to infer meaning, feelings or motives.

Choice
Children explore why an author has chosen particular words, phrases or structures and the effect this has on the reader.

Across the term, lessons focus on each of these domains so that pupils develop a well-rounded understanding of texts.

ERIC Starters

Each guided reading lesson begins with a short ERIC starter activity lasting around 10 minutes. These activities might include:

• adverts

• film trailers

• images

• book covers

These tasks encourage discussion and develop comprehension skills without relying heavily on reading, allowing all children to participate and share ideas.

Reading in Key Stage 1

In Key Stage 1, the approach is slightly adapted to support early readers. Sessions focus more on decoding and understanding new vocabulary, alongside the early comprehension skills of:

Decode – Explain – Retrieve – Interpret (DERI)

Children explore words, discuss ideas and begin to answer simple comprehension questions.

Throughout guided reading lessons, children learn to:

• skim and scan texts for key information

• answer questions using evidence from the text

• explain their thinking clearly

We encourage pupils to structure their answers using APE:

Answer – Prove – Explain

This helps children justify their ideas and develop stronger written responses.

Building Reading Vocabulary

Understanding the language used in reading questions is an important skill. We teach children to recognise and understand common question stems such as:

• According to the text…

• Find and copy…

• What impression do you get of…

• Give two reasons…

• Explain what this suggests…

Developing this vocabulary helps pupils become more confident when answering comprehension questions.

Our Aim

Our reading curriculum supports children to:

• develop a love of reading

• think critically about texts

• discuss and justify their ideas

• build strong comprehension skills that support learning across the curriculum.

  For more information on our Reading Curriculum, please click here.