Crown WoodReading Spine
Our reading spine is designed using books – written by inspirational authors – which we value and want the children to have read by the time they leave primary education. The texts are purposefully selected to take the reader on a journey, from sharing picture books, to sharing a range of chapter books that gradually expose the reader to beautifully crafted storylines with evermore intriguing and challenging themes.
Research shows that sharing quality narratives, which the children would not necessarily choose to read for themselves, develops not only a love of reading but improves vocabulary development and language skills, develops imagination and empathy, and enables children to learn about people, places and events outside of their own experience. In turn, this promotes achievement in all writing genres across the curriculum.
Each year group has a defined set of core texts. This reading spine is intended to offer our children a core bank of texts that ensures they experience a range of high quality texts and authors during their time at school. Teachers use these in a range of ways, as whole class texts to share, during vocabulary and punctuation sessions, as part of their 10 day writing journey and in connection with our wider curriculum topics. Children are also encouraged to read these texts independently or share with parents at home.
For all year groups from Nursery to Year Six there are a selection of general texts that form part of the Reading Spine. For years One to Six there are also five types of texts that children should have access to in order to successfully navigate reading with confidence. These are complex beyond a lexical level and demand more from the reader than other types of books.
The five types of text are:
- Archaic – book that are over 50 years old that display language and writing styles less familiar to children. These texts can appear more complex but will allow children to feel more comfortable with this style of language when they move onto secondary school and study book by Shakespeare and Chaucer etc.
- Non-Linear Time Sequences – texts that do not follow a direct time line but instead double back or change years.
- Narratively Complex - Books that are sometimes narrated by an unreliable narrator or have several narrators throughout the story
- Figurative/Symbolic Text – Books that work on a symbolic level or have a story within a story
- Resistant Texts – Texts that require the reader to assemble meaning as they are deliberately written to not be easy to interpret at first
The Reading Spine documents can be read below.
