At CSIA, we firmly believe that literacy is an essential skill to enable students to read and write as experts in every subject across the curriculum. These skills are vital to make sense of the world around us. As such, the better we are at these skills the more successful we can expect to be in life. At CSIA, we recognise that improving literacy can have an impact on students’ self-esteem, motivation, behaviour and attainment. We believe that reading, and particularly reading for pleasure, has a direct impact on cognitive and social communicative development. It has been shown to improve health and wellbeing, as well as improving compassion and empathy for others. Our aim is to develop each student’s potential to the point where they are reading at, or above, their chronological age.

At CSIA, we:

• Celebrate reading for enjoyment
• Tutor groups have timetabled DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) Sessions
• Explicitly teach vocabulary appropriate to each subject area
• Use effective strategies to support comprehension and vocabulary acquisition
• Promote classroom talk (oral literacy) to enable quality written work
• Provide intervention where needed
• Provide staff with appropriate CPD

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