Reading at St Aloysius

Reading Beyond Phonics

As pupils progress through school, we use Treetops from Oxford Reading Tree as our primary scheme to continue to develop children’s reading skills. Reading books are graded by difficulty of reading levels known as Book Bands. Each Book Band has its own colour.  Teachers will use their professional judgement and assessment to assign a book band level to a child.  This level will dictate which set of books children can independently choose from. Our books are carefully organised into these levels making it easy for children to locate a book suitable to their interests. Once a pupil has chosen a book they will record their reading progress in a daily record and will have an opportunity to read with a member of staff on a regular basis. Teachers can then use this information to make sure that the texts that children are accessing are suitable. We also encourage all pupils to choose a ‘Reading for Pleasure’ book to take home from either their class library or the school library.

Wider Reading

Reading a wide variety of high-quality literature is central to our curriculum approach. Our whole school reading spine, linked to our Ready Steady Write curriculum, sets out a progression of classic and contemporary picture books, novels and poetry collections to be read for pleasure by the teacher with the whole class to ensure that all children are introduced to variety of inspiring and challenging literature, whatever their own current reading level.

Teaching Comprehension Skills

At St Aloysius we use VIPERS to teach comprehension skills from Y2 for pupils who have secure phonic knowledge through to Y6. 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 (KS1) or Summarise (KS2)

The 6 domains focus on the comprehension aspect of reading and not the mechanics: decoding, fluency, prosody etc. VIPERS is not a reading scheme but rather a method of ensuring that teachers ask, and pupils are familiar with, a range of questions.  They allow the teacher to ask targeted questions. 

What does a VIPERS lesson look like?         

VIPERS style reading lessons are taught for 4 x 30 minutes each week from Years 2-6. Through the use of VIPERS, children are explicitly taught the comprehension skills of reading as outlined in the National Curriculum.

During a typical session the teacher will share which VIPERS content domain/s the children will be focusing on for that session. Types of text given, including poetry, songs, picture books and short films, are appropriate to the age and key stage of the children. They can be a stand-alone VIPERS text, a text related to their class reader or the wider curriculum, supported by Literacy Shed Plus. 

During these sessions teachers cover: fiction, non fiction and poetry.

Children read during these sessions in a variety of different ways. They may hear the teacher model fluent reading and then have time to reread the same extract themselves, they may read individually and feedback, work in groups, take turns in pairs or read aloud to their peers. You may see a number of these different strategies during one session.

Teachers plan 3-5 key questions each session based on the content domain being focused on. Children are encouraged to orally rehearse their answer before writing anything down. We use a maximum of 5 questions each session to ensure children have time to provide quality answers. At times children are given sentence stems and vocabulary that is expected to be used within their answer. 

Recording and Assessment of VIPERS

We encourage children to orally talk through their answers and ensure it is the best they can give before writing anything down. We also acknowledge it is necessary for children to also be able to formally record an answer. Children can do this in a variety of different ways such as discussing the answer first with peers and/or an adult and then writing their best answer, working individually and then editing their answer accordingly after discussion.  

During this reading session teachers focus on specific children during the session, this may mean hearing them read individually whilst others are reading independently, in pairs or groups, discussing answers with those children and working one to one or within a group with them during a session whilst the others form an answer independently. 

Teachers can then assess these children based on NC expectations and how they are performing relating to the specific content domain every half term on specifically designed questions, suited to the class and the learning which has taken place.