Intent
At Salterlee, we value reading as a key life skill and are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers. We aim to instil a love of reading in our children. Reading at Salterlee is seen as an integral part of learning, rather than a separate subject to be learned independently.
Our school approach:
- Daily teaching of Phonics
- Teaching specific reading skills in discrete reading lessons
- Incorporating reading into all lessons across the curriculum
- Daily story time of high quality texts to foster a love of books
We use reading VIPERS to teach comprehension. This is a whole class reading approach that equips pupils with the necessary skills to be successful readers. VIPERS stands for: vocabulary, infer, predict, explain, retrieve and sequence/summarise. These are all linked to the assessed strands at the end of key stage assessments. We use a range of high quality texts and teach VIPERS in discrete reading lessons.
Teaching of reading, phonics at key stage 1
We use Ruth Miskin’s ‘Read Write Inc. Phonics’ as our Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme. This programme is followed by all teachers and teaching assistants. All teachers and teaching assistants have received training in delivering this programme. Discrete phonics lessons are taught to all children, daily in Year’s 1, 2 and Reception- and for older pupils as appropriate. For this, children are placed into ability groupings to ensure learning is appropriate and relevant.
This is based on synthetic phonics, which enables young children to identify, blend and segment the individual phonemes (the sounds that letters or groups of letters make) in words.
Key stage 2
Alongside regular opportunities for reading across all curriculum subjects, pupils in Key Stage 2 have a focused reading lesson every week where they can develop specific reading skills. In these lessons, the focus is on knowledge retrieval and understanding of the texts covered. Some pupils may also receive additional support in the form of guided reading sessions, whereby pupils read in small groups with an adult and discuss the texts read.