Reading

At St Augustine’s pupils are taught to read fluently with understanding, fostering a love of reading for pleasure and enabling them to access all other areas of learning.                          

Our intentions in reading are for our children to:

•  read easily, fluently and with good understanding
• develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
• acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language.
• appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage.
• write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences
• use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas
• are competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate.

Classrooms reflect the importance of reading for pleasure by providing the children with a quiet reading area and a range of fiction and cross- curricular topic books.

Children are given the opportunity to read to an adult in school and hear a class book or picture book read to them daily (if possible) by the class teacher. Each class has an opportunity to use the library where children can choose their own library book. The children also can take home a reading scheme book.

During ‘book club’ the children have the opportunity to hear recommendations from others including adults in the room and also recommend books to others.

During their reading journey at St Augustine’s the children will learn about reading VIPERS. As a school, we use The Literacy Shed to support the teaching of the VIPERS and to make cross curricular links where possible.

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 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 children 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.