Reading

Reading

 

At Thornhill Primary School, we believe that all pupils should leave us as confident, fluent readers. We recognise that reading is a key to unlocking the rest of the academic curriculum. Being an able reader significantly improves a child’s future academic achievement, wellbeing and success in life.

 

Following our school values:

Respectful:

• We aim to foster our children’s life-long love of reading by promoting reading for pleasure. Reading is at the heart of our curriculum. Throughout school, reading is promoted and encouraged through displays, conversations, assemblies and recommendations.
• We understand that children need to see themselves in the books they read. They also need to see beyond what they know, sharing cultural experiences. We continually renew our book shelves with quality rich texts to give our children access to interesting and meaningful reading material. Teachers read to children daily and read fiction, non-fiction and poetry every week. Sharing and discussing our reading offers opportunities to broaden children’s experiences beyond the immediate and the local, for example, books about space, other countries, animals, exploration, and courageous people from a range of occupations and ethnic backgrounds

Resilient:

• Reading is major tool to develop children’s vocabulary, which will enable them to effectively express themselves in spoken and written form. Children are given regular reading for pleasure sessions to read texts of their choice. They regularly share and discuss their texts with others. Book-related talk introduces children to language that they might not hear in ordinary conversation, especially the vocabulary of the book itself. It also promotes enthusiasm and the love of reading.

Ready:

• We follow a validated synthetic phonics programme so that our children are equipped with the skills to decode any unfamiliar words. Phonics is inclusive to all children, who require help with their early reading skills, regardless of their age. Reading practice for children following the phonics scheme takes place three times a week and includes decoding, prosody and comprehension.

VIPERS

When children are secure with phonics, we teach reading using the VIPERS approach.

 

What are Vipers?

VIPERS is an acronym to aid the recall of the 6 reading domains as part of the UK’s reading curriculum.  They are the key areas which we feel children need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts.

VIPERS stands for

Vocabulary

Inference

Prediction

Explanation

Retrieval

Sequence or Summarise

The 6 domains focus on the comprehension aspect of reading and not the mechanics: decoding, fluency, prosody etc.  As such, VIPERS is not a reading scheme but rather a method of ensuring that teachers ask, and students are familiar with, a range of questions.  They allow the teacher to track the type of questions asked and the children’s responses to these which allows for targeted questioning afterwards.

 

reading vipers question stems ks2 pdf.pdf

 

Reading Apps 

 

 

The Reading Realm and The Poetry Realm are free apps that can be used on an iPad or tablet. They give children access to a variety of age related texts and quizzes about their reading.