Reading
Intent
At Kilsby C of E Primary School, we endeavour to ensure that by the end of their primary school education, all of our children become fluent, confident and enthusiastic life-long readers. This will enable them to enter secondary school education equipped with the skills to succeed and reach their full potential whilst also providing opportunities to ‘live life in all its fullness’ (John 10:10) through this key skill in life.
Once the children have completed the Little Wandle Phonics scheme, they are introduced to the VIPERS strands/skills in KS2. These include:
- Vocabulary
- Inference
- Prediction
- Explanation
- Retrieval
- Summarising/Sequencing
The children are immersed within a range of high quality and diverse texts within VIPERS. It is also the expectation that all genres are covered (fiction/non-fiction/poetry) across the academic year to ensure progression and breadth of coverage. We believe that this instils a love of reading and an appreciation of a wide range of genres, authors and cultures which in turn develops our children into confident, thoughtful and generous individuals who represent our Christian ethos.
Implementation
Explicit whole class teaching of VIPERS takes place weekly (4 sessions a week). Each week, the sessions focus on a key VIPERS skill to ensure that our children explore this in depth. Reading tasks are embedded within the sessions to allow our children to become confident at applying the VIPERS skills both within their reading sessions and across their entire education.
‘Reading for Pleasure’ sessions and visits to the school library are also timetabled into the week to ensure that we promote a love of reading with our children and to give them the opportunity to engage with a variety of texts and authors alongside those explicitly taught within the curriculum.
Reading at home is encouraged and promoted throughout the school and our children are awarded house points for every three reads completed at home. Reading accomplishments are also celebrated within the classroom and in our weekly ‘Spotlight Awards Worship’ with the whole school.
Assessment
Teachers will continually assess the children formatively throughout sessions, allowing them to progress to a range of different questions and activities to promote and extend their skills in VIPERS. The children are also assessed summatively at the start and end of each term to ensure that they can demonstrate their progress in reading. Additional support and interventions are provided for those children who are not yet working at age-related expectation.