READING
Intent
At St Peter's RC Primary School, we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic readers. We believe that reading is a vital skill and a gateway to success, paving way for independence, confidence and an abundance of opportunities in life.
Through high quality teaching of phonics, comprehension and engagement with a wide range of topics and genres, we aspire to develop confident, independent readers with a genuine love of reading.
Implementation
Teaching of Reading and Reading for Pleasure / Performance – EYFS and Year 1
We use the government approved Phonics Shed scheme to teach reading in Early Years and Key stage One. Each of the sounds is categorised into “chapters”, which are taught from the very beginning of Reception class and completed by the end of Summer A term in Year 1, in time for the phonics screening check.
In EYFS, children read 1-1 with an adult each week and when children are ready this moves to guided reading sessions. In Year 1, guided reading takes place daily in small groups. Each day, a focus group of children has quality reading and discussion time with their teacher, whilst other groups practise vital skills such as letter formation, phonics revision, word reading and blending. Every child takes home one phonetically decodable book and one Oxford Reading Tree colour banded book, for comprehension and tracking. Children who wish to continue their reading also have access to a wide range of other phonetically decodable books online on Phonics Shed.
There is also regular opportunity to engage in reading for pleasure. Children take home reading for pleasure books and are also encouraged to choose a book for their teacher to read to them each day to develop their exposure to a wide range of authors. Even in the very early stages of reading, staff provide children with opportunities to listen to audio books during continuous provision, share topic related texts with their friends when immersed in play and act out their favourite stories with puppets / story spoons etc. Children have opportunities to rehearse and read for performance in assemblies and whole school productions, such as the Nativity. Children practise songs, narrate stories and recite poetry. Reading areas are clear and inviting, encouraging children to access them independently during continuous provision.
Small groups of younger children are provided with specific times to visit the school library and choose a book to take home. The library is well resourced with a range of genres and authors. Boxes of books for each topic are available to all classes to enhance learning and promote a love of reading in all subject areas.
Each class has daily protected reading time, in which the teacher reads to the class. A whole school reading spine has been constructed by the English lead, taking preferences and input from all teachers. As a result, our personalised Saint Peter's reading spine ensures that children are exposed to a range of authors, genres and texts throughout their school life.
All classes have a focus author of the half term, which is displayed in each classroom and discussed regularly, enabling children to build up a knowledge and enjoyment of a range of authors and genres from a young age.
Teaching of Reading in Yrs2-6
At St Peter's RC Primary School, we use VIPERs – Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explaining, Retrieval and Summarising/Sequencing - (from Y2-Y6) as a tool with which to carry out whole-class reading lessons each week. Within these whole-class reading sessions, we use a range of techniques to ensure all children are engaged and supported. Children in Year 6 also have regular access to practise SATs papers, enabling them to navigate the reading tests when they arise.
Individual reading books are banded by colour and tracked on a year group tracker, which enables discussions about interventions required during pupil progress meetings with the English Lead. Children are encouraged to select their own reading book from their book band, to encourage a love of reading and an ownership over their own learning.
Children who require extra support have regular 1-1 or small group reading interventions, as well as phonics interventions. Where phonic interventions are no longer appropriate, we use interventions such as Precision Teaching and ToeByToe to help children progress in their learning.
There is also regular opportunity to engage in reading for pleasure. All classes have a basket containing books for children to choose and take home at their leisure. Classes have a range of authors and genres available for independent reading time. Children have opportunities to rehearse and read for performance in assemblies and whole school productions, such as the Passion Play and Crowning of Mary. Children practise songs, narrate stories and recite poetry.
Some children in KS2 are library monitors, helping an adult run the library at lunch times for all KS2 children to access. The library is well resourced with a range of genres and authors. Boxes of books for each topic are available to all classes to enhance learning and promote a love of reading in all subject areas. All year groups have library time timetabled into their learning, with weekly opportunities to visit the library.
Each class has daily protected reading time, in which the teacher reads to the class / children have opportunity to read for pleasure. A whole-school reading spine has been constructed by the English Lead, taking preferences and input from all teachers. As a result, our personalised Saint Peter’s reading spine ensures that children are exposed to a range of authors, genres and texts throughout their school life.
All classes have a focus author of the half term, which is displayed in each classroom and discussed regularly, enabling children to build up a knowledge and enjoyment of a range of authors and genres from a young age.
Impact
Through the teaching of systematic phonics, our aim is for children to become fluent readers by the end of Key Stage 1. Through whole class reading and regular practice moving into KS2, children will begin to have a deeper understanding of their reading and a love of a range of authors. This will ensure they can access the whole curriculum with ease and provide a gateway to success in their future lives. Attainments is measured by the Phonics Screening Test at the end of Year 1, formative assessments throughout the year, termly PIRA reading tests from the end of yr1 and SATs at the end of Year 6.
Reading progression (VIPERS)
We use VIPERS as a basis for teaching Reading skills.
Vipers (created by Rob Smith, The Literacy Shed) is a range of reading prompts based on the 2016 reading content domains found in the National Curriculum Test Framework documents for KS1 and KS2. VIPERS is an acronym to aid the recall of the six reading domains as part of the 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 stand for Vocabulary, Infer, Predict, Explain, Retrieve and Sequence (KS1) or Summarise (KS2).
In KS1, ‘Explain’; is not one of the content domains, rather it asks children why they have come to a certain conclusion, to explain their preferences, thoughts and opinions about a text. In KS2, the Explain section covers the additional content domains, which are not present in KS1.
The six 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.
See below for the progression of these skills. Although they are arranged by year group, the level of challenge is adjusted by teachers according to the needs of individual children.
| Name | |
|---|---|
| St Peter's Vipers-skills-progression .pdf | Download |
| Name | |
|---|---|
| Reading progression of skills for St Peter's 2025.pdf | Download |
If you are looking for appropriate books to read with your child at home please click the link below.
Our Reading Champions
We are very proud of our reading champions at Saint Peter's. They have been chosen for their passion for reading. They have lots of special jobs throughout the year, including reading 1-1 with younger children as reading buddies, helping our reading leaders with pupil voice interviews and recommending texts to other children via our school library and by reading texts and going into classes to read and recommend them too. They contribute to and take ownership over our whole school reading display, writing down their opinions on favourite texts.
Reading Buddies
Some of our youngest children have a reading buddy, who they read with in a lunch time club. The older children are doing a fantastic job of helping our youngest children on their reading journey.
Reading for Pleasure at Saint Peter's
All classes have a reading for pleasure basket for children to select books to enjoy with their families at home. EYFS take home Betsy the bunny and a little treat to go with their story! We invite parents in to read in all classes to share their favourite stories, which our children love! Classes also have allocated time in our well resourced school library each week and enjoy listening to their teacher read them a book for pleasure from our reading spine. Children in older classes have a book in which they recommend their favourite books and authors to other children. We hold a very popular book swap on World Book Day and invite authors / poets in to share their wisdom and further inspire our pupils.
In addition to celebrating a love of reading every day, we enjoyed a memorable World Book Day this year, with a masked reader competition, (can you guess all the members of staff?!), biscuits and books between older and younger classes, a paper plate book competition, book swaps in every class, designing bunting for our local library’s 135th birthday, a zoom with different authors and even an assembly led by Miss Trunchbull herself!
Performance Poetry
Every class learns a poem each half term. They recite this to their peers during celebration assemblies. We are so proud of how hard the children work on this!
Sharing Our Reading With Other Classes
Year 5 wrote some fantastic stories in their religion lessons. They came to share them with our Year 1 children, who were thrilled to sit and listen to and discuss the stories.
Certificates and Awards
Children are regularly encouraged with reading and hard work is celebrated. Children receive certificates in assemblies for moving up to a new book band or working hard on spelling shed. Children who complete our reading scheme receive a special bookmark to celebrate this. Many of our children completed the Summer Reading Challenge, which makes us feel very proud!
