Literacy
Reading for Pleasure Curriculum
We have designed a varied and engaging Reading for Pleasure Curriculum at Deyes which provides students with a breadth of reading experience from a range of seminal world literature. Students will read three texts throughout the year from genres of British Fiction, Non-Fiction and World Fiction.
We are committed to a structured approach to Reading for Pleasure and as such our lessons follow a Six Step Model:
- Activating Prior Knowledge
- Explicit Vocabulary Instruction
- Read along with a ruler
- Either Echo Reading or Oral Rehearsal/ Read Aloud
- Comprehension
- Student Led Summarising
Reading Intervention
Alongside our Reading for Pleasure curriculum, we provide interventions to strengthen our students’ learning and ensure extra support is given depending on which of the below strands each student needs support with:
- Strand A– Phonics
- Strand B- Word Reading and Comprehension
- Strand C- Vocabulary/Syntax/Grammar
- Strand D- Fluency and Comprehension
Our interventions are delivered through Lexonik, Lexia and Rapid Plus.
Lexonik
Lexonik Advance supports learners in mastering academic vocabulary, enabling them to achieve an average reading age gain of 27 months in just six weeks. This impressive outcome highlights the programme’s effectiveness in rapidly improving literacy skills, making it a powerful resource for both students and educators.
Lexia
Built on the science of reading, Lexia provides equitable learning opportunities for all students, promoting their success and well-being. Lexia follows an adaptive blended learning model that offers explicit, systematic, and personalised reading instruction. This approach allows educators to deliver differentiated literacy instruction to students of all abilities.
Rapid Plus
Built upon the extraordinary success of Rapid, the primary intervention programme proven to deliver more than twice the normal rate of progress*. Rapid Plus delivers age-appropriate content, rigorously levelled and trialled with Key Stage 3 students. This program significantly improves reading fluency and comprehension for struggling KS3 readers.
Supporting our Strongest Readers
Across our student body at Deyes we have some incredibly strong readers and we are firmly committed to encouraging them to flourish further with their love of literature. Through Sparx Reader we enable them to access a vast range of texts that are targeted at their individual reading ability to ensure they are never reading anything that does not stretch them further. We motivate our students to unlock a Gold Reader Pass which allows them to add their own physical books to their Sparx Library. Our students at Deyes have access to a brand new and fully resourced library to further their studies and enhance their reading for pleasure collection. The strongest readers in our school act as reading mentors for those that need to develop further enabling them to act as role models and leaders within our reading community at Deyes.
Reading at Home
- Statistics from the National Literacy Trust show that:
“Only 1 in 5 (20.5%) 8- to 18-year-olds told us that they read something daily in their free time in 2024, again, the lowest levels we’ve recorded since 2005, with daily reading levels decreasing by 7.5pp in the last year alone.”
According to the OECD 2002 Report, reading for pleasure is the most important indicator of a child’s future success.
Deyes High School is committed to ensuring that every student is encouraged to read for pleasure at home. As part of this our students are required to complete up to 60 minutes of reading per week through the Sparx Reader platform.
Sparx personalises each child’s home reading, offering four e-books for students to read independently matched to their individual reading ability. Students are encouraged to read carefully and rewarded for accuracy in their reading, not speed. After students read a section of their e-book, then will be told to stop and answer a series of multiple-choice questions to check their understanding. They earn Sparx Reader Points (SRP) based on their reading accuracy. Students are placed into a school leaderboard and are rewarded for their consistent achievements in reading for pleasure.
Students should use their Deyes High email address and Deyes High network password to log in to Sparx. In order to do this, they will need to visit the Sparx website, click on the ‘Log in to Sparx using Microsoft’ button on the log in screen and enter the information. Sparx is optimised to work on laptops, mobile devices and tablets.
Sparx Reader Website – https://sparxreader.com/
