Skip to content ↓

The Stonebridge School

Learning for Life

The Stonebridge School

Learning for Life

KS2 Reading (Destination Reader)

Reading in Key Stage 2

Destination Reader

Reading is at the heart of all our learning across the curriculum.

Our aim is to support children in developing their reading by exposing them to as many different reading genres as possible, while fostering excitement and love for reading.

To ensure this we have launched Destination Reader at Stonebridge this academic year as our approach to reading for Years 3 to 6.

Destination Reader can be applied to all texts and is designed to create a culture of reading for pleasure and purpose.

Destination Reader is a pedagogical based approach to teaching reading for KS2, where daily, structured reading sessions are backed up with partner work and independent reading to teach children to read with greater understanding, enjoyment and purpose. The approach started in Hackney which has a high-performing network of schools that perform above the national average for reading attainment.

Destination Reader has enabled our teachers in Key Stage 2 to understand how to explicitly teach reading strategies. It provides a consistent framework for teaching and the sentence stems have equipped the children to talk about reading (see links below). We have also seen children naturally using these stems in other areas of the curriculum. A love of reading has been more evident and our reading sessions are now much more focused on reading strategies.

The structured nature of the reading sessions implement solid reading routines into the school day, providing a consistent, systematic approach. This allows the children to be fully independent learners, deepening their comprehension of the texts through the systematic use of a series of strategies and learning stems.

This approach encompasses the key principles of effective reading provision and fully meets the requirements of the National Curriculum, but more than that – it helps to foster a love of reading in our children that can last for a lifetime.

Furthermore, because Destination Reader is not a scheme, it is flexible to work with any texts the school chooses.

The children have a Destination Reader session every day and it lasts for about 40 minutes.

During reading sessions, children are taught skills to help them develop a deeper understanding of what is being read.

Children take part in class and group discussion. Key skills include: clarifying, predicting, asking questions, inference, making connections and summarising.

Destination Reader is supplemented with Daily Support Reading for those children falling behind in KS2