At St. Mary's we want to ensure that our children are readers for life. We understand that fluency is a vital building block in the children's reading journey. There is a wealth of evidence which highlights the important role fluency plays in pupils’ reading development.

So, why is fluency important?

Fluent reading supports reading comprehension. When pupils read fluently, their cognitive resources can be redirected from focusing on decoding and onto comprehending the text. For this reason, fluency is sometimes described as a bridge from word recognition to comprehension.

We us the Little Wandle Fluency programme which supports our teaching of the Big Cat for Little Wandle Fluency books, which include an inclusive mix of fiction and non-fiction. The 40 books progress from Fluency 1 to Fluency 10. 

From Year 2 - Year 6 we use 'Reader’s Theatre'  which is a widely used teaching strategy that exemplifies how guided oral reading instruction and repeated reading of texts can be used to support pupils to develop reading fluency.