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Reading

As a school we place great importance on the teaching, learning and most importantly, the love of reading.

VIPERS

Every child has a weekly whole class shared reading session called VIPERS. VIPERS stands for:

Vocabulary 

Inference

Prediction

Explanation

Retrieval

Sequence or Summarise

VIPERS is a method of us ensuring that teachers ask and students are familiar with, a range of questions. All children from Reception right up to the end of Year 6, access age appropriate texts with activities being adapted for all of the children to be able to succeed. Reading, oral and written comprehension type activities are included.

Individual Reading books

Every child takes an individual reading book home daily to read to their family and will read to an adult regularly in school. Parents are encouraged to make comments about the reading process in the home school diary. We have a wide range fiction, non-fiction and poetry books for children to choose from.

In Nursery, pupils take story books home for their parents to share with them and enjoy together. As pupils move into Reception and start to develop their skills in reading, they begin to take individual reading books home. Pupils progress through reading books which closely match the phonics knowledge that pupils are being taught and we offer plenty of opportunities to practise reading and re-reading the grapheme-phoneme correspondences that they have learnt. 

After pupils progress through the levelled reading books matched to their phonics knowledge, they move onto our Accelerated Reader program for their individual reading books. On this, students read a book, take an online quiz and get immediate feedback. Children complete a Star Reader assessment regularly to match them to the best level of books for them. Vocabulary growth and literacy skills are also measured, giving teachers valuable insight into how best to support them in their next steps. 

Reading Spine

In addition to children reading and developing their skills, we place a huge importance of reading aloud to children. Our reading spine builds a selection of the very best books to read aloud to our children and broaden their social, moral, aspirational, cultural and spiritual outlooks on life. These books help children to be exposed to books that they are not yet able to read independently and engage at a deeper level, entering the world of the story, fostering a love of reading. Children are read aloud to by an adult everyday. 

Non-Fiction

To ensure that our pupils develop a love for an experience of non-fiction books as well as fiction we have ‘Non-Fiction Friday’ at school where staff selection a non-fiction book to read aloud and share with pupils. This has been highly successful and then children very much enjoy this diversity in the books that they are experiencing. of books for the children to choose from an The school library van visits school once a term and we also have collections of topic resources on loan from the library. Phonics and spelling also play a huge part in the teaching of reading.

Poetry Spine

We also have specific poet and poetry spines and nursery rhymes to develop and encourage a love for word play, rhyme and language exploration. 

Broader Experiences

Regular visits to a library van to select books also offer the pupils the opportunity to access a broader range of books. In addition to this, we have topic book boxes which are linked to specific studies covered in other subjects. These are changed half termly and enable pupils read books and further their knowledge in a broad range of subject areas.