At Ark Acton we recognise that reading is a gateway into the human experience, and want to develop a lifelong love of reading and literature in our students - not only for the inherent pleasure it brings, but for the broad-ranging benefits it has for all areas of a student's learning. Our reading programme consists of two main strands: knowledge building through our curriculum with a focus on academic texts, and our sequenced reading intervention programme, aimed at closing the reading gap for all learners.
Structure of our reading interventions
Morning Reading - students participate in morning reading, reading texts from our Ark Acton canon. We want students to experience the joy that comes from immersing yourself into a book and learning about different cultural experiences.
Lexia - If a student is struggling with comprehension, they use computer-based platform Lexia to diagnose exactly where they are struggling and how the teacher can best support them. When students make a year’s progress in their reading, they graduate out of Lexia and into Morning Reading.
Fresh Start - If a student is struggling to decode words, they complete Fresh Start, a teacher-led phonics reading programme, before graduating onto Lexia.
Thinking Reading - When students are significantly below their chronological reading age and has identified SEN, they engage in a six-month programme of 1:1 phonics and vocabulary instruction. After each session, the teacher inputs data about what students were able to achieve and a bespoke plan is created for the next session. Once students have reached their chronological age, students can graduate into Morning Reading.
Rosetta Stone - If a student arrives with minimal English, we use Rosetta Stone to help them get to a level of conversational English. Once students acquire the foundations of English language, students are in a position to learn how to decode and participate in Fresh Start.
The Sora Reading App - The Sora App offers pupils an interactive reading experience where they can earn rewards and get recommendations for new books based on their reading history. When viewing ebooks on the Sora App, pupils can highlight text on the page, leave notes in the margins, quickly locate dictionary definitions and listen to a narrator read difficult passages in the text.