Our core aim, when teaching English, is to engage and inspire children in both reading and writing, so that they acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, understanding and independence to become lifelong learners and linguists. We strive to ensure that all of our pupils receive a well-rounded learning experience when reading, writing, speaking and listening which will equip them with the fundamental tools to achieve in school and beyond.
English is a core subject of the National Curriculum, and a prerequisite for educational and social progress, as it underpins the work undertaken in all areas of the curriculum. The acquisition of language and early reading skills are of the upmost importance to us and therefore the teaching of all aspects English is given a high priority within school.
Early Reading and Phonics
At Ide Hill CE School, we believe that reading is the foundation of all learning which allows children to access all areas of the curriculum successfully. We present it to children as a valuable and rewarding experience.
We follows a rigorous and systematic approach to the teaching of synthetic phonics following Rising Star's Rocket Phonics scheme of work. Our school’s approach to phonics establishes consistent practice, continuity and progression in the teaching and learning of phonics.
We engage in staff training and development, to ensure that our phonics teaching is of a high-quality. In EYFS and KS1, all children receive daily, discrete, phonics and spelling lessons. We use Rocket Phonics materials to support the teaching of phonics, ensuring that we adapt our sessions to meet the needs of all children in class. Each child is given an up to date reading book that is phonetically decodable for the stage of their phonics development. This supports pupils in developing mastery in their reading by consistently applying their knowledge and skills to new texts.
We ensure that there is an emphasis on early intervention and staff are skilled at identifying pupils who may be in need of additional support or challenge. As a result, children flourish into confident, fluent and enthusiastic readers and writers.
In Key Stage 2 children continue to follow the National Curriculum's expectations for spelling. These include dictation exercises, investigations of spelling patterns, focused spelling activities within small groups and weekly spelling lists sent home for important consolidation.
Throughout Key Stage 2, we use VIPERS from the Literacy Shed curriculum as a key approach to teach reading and develop comprehension skills. 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. Mechanics of reading (decoding, fluency, prosody) is taught throughout our whole class guided reading sessions.
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 students 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.