Destination Reader focuses on these key principles which we embed within the school:

• Enable quality experience
• Promote enjoyment
• Increase reading mileage
• Build firm foundations
• Develop thinking and understanding
• Make talk central

Destination Reader allows children to access real books of a high quality that are engaging and exciting. As talk is made central, partner reading is continued and children are given ample opportunities to discuss books with their partners. To encourage respective communication, children are taught to use sentence starters to support them in actively listening and participating and discussing and explaining their ideas. Here is an example of the stems that we use within lesson and children could also be encouraged to use them at home.

The program covers seven key skills identifies within the national curriculum to support the reading and understanding of a wide range of texts. These are:

• Predicting
• Making connections
• Asking questions
• Evaluating
• Inferring
• Summarising
• Clarifying

While children read their book with their partner they are encouraged to stop and have discussions in a respectful way as mentioned above, and also through addressing a variety of these skills, some of which will be being specifically teacher taught using sentence stems in the same way. You could prompt your child to refer to these sentence stems when reading at home or answering questions about a book you have read to them.