Hoylake Holy Trinity Reading Spine 

“Imagine a school where pupils enjoy, discuss and work with a core of books. These ‘essential reads’ would be a store of classics, creating a living library inside a child’s mind. This is the Reading Spine… a common bank of stories that bind the community together”

Pie Corbett

Reading for pleasure is known to have a significant impact on children’s attainment and life chances. We strive for every child to have a love of reading in our school and reading is central to everything that we do.

We have developed a ‘reading spine’ of key books that we believe will enrich the children’s experiences, bring enjoyment and nurture a love of reading. 

The reading spine was compiled using the principles of Doug Lemov’s 5 Reading Plagues’, Pie Corbett’s reading spine and poetry spine., combined with our drive to represent diversity in the books children read and the authors who have written them.  Our reading spine will be reviewed each year and updated accordingly. 

Each year group has a set of core texts that ensures the children experience a range of high quality texts and authors during their time here. 

Our core texts and additional texts are shared in English lessons and during whole class reading. 

In school, children have a dedicated Read Aloud time each day and this can be a story, poem or non-fiction book which has been selected for the class from their special ‘read aloud basket’.  We have separate books that link to the topics that are being taught to ensure children are reading a breadth of books across the curriculum. 

“Books need to enable children to look through windows in order to see the realities of others and into mirrors in order to see their own reality reflected.”

Emily Style

At Hoylake Holy Trinity, we understand how important reading is to ensure children develop empathy and experience opportunities to read books which reflect the wide world in which they live. We are proud to have invested a lot of money in our school and class libraries, and the bookshelves are now overflowing with high quality, inclusive and representative literature. These beautiful books will allow our readers to deepen and enrich their understanding of the diverse world they are growing up in, and their place in it.