Through reading in particular, children have a chance to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. Literature especially plays a key role in such development. Reading also enables children both to acquire knowledge and to build on what they already know. We are committed to enabling our children to become confident, critical readers through our teaching and through their exposure to varied and challenging material. Stories, poetry, drama and media are used to encourage and motivate writing within the school.
To help develop reading skills, we use a resource called 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.
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. Children can also ask their own questions to enable further understanding of a text.
We promote the reading of high quality texts across our curriculum so that children develop a love of reading. For help choosing high quality text to read at home, these website have lots of suggestions which we highly recommend.
https://www.thereaderteacher.com/
https://clpe.org.uk/corebooks/about
https://www.booktrust.org.uk/books-and-reading/our-recommendations/
The Oxford reading Owl website also has some good suggestions on how to support reading at home. https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/common-reading-issues/struggling-readers/
They also have a free eBook library to help children develop their reading skills at home. Registration is free! https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/free-ebooks/
If you are worried about your child's interest in reading, then always talk to their class teacher.
READING PROGRESSION OF SKILLS (click)