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Reading & Phonics

It is our intention to ensure that by the end of their primary education, all children are able to read fluently and comprehend what they have read, in any subject or interest.  Our aim is that through reading, pupils have a chance to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually.  We intend for reading to feed children’s imagination.  Developing a love of reading, whether it be fiction or non-fiction, is the key to being a successful learner.
 
Therefore, we intend to encourage all pupils to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction texts and different genres, to develop knowledge of themselves and the world in which they live and to establish an appreciation and love of reading.  Children will acquire knowledge across the curriculum and build upon what they already know and develop their comprehension skills through a range of high quality and immersive texts, which provide challenge.  We are committed to providing vocabulary rich reading material and stimulating learning environments throughout Ide Hill CE Primary.  We aim to ensure reading is embedded within meaningful contexts across a range of subjects and that robust assessments of reading are carried out through both summative and formative data, where teachers can use moderation to secure judgements.
 
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. 
This short video for parents, carers and families explains what the English alphabetic code is and how we teach it through the Rocket Phonics SSP programme.
 
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Throughout Key Stage 2, we use VIPERS from the Literacy Shed curriculum as a key approach to teach reading and develop comprehension skills. This provides our teachers with a range of high quality texts, films and animations to enhance the teaching of reading and comprehension skills.  It is important to teach the skills of comprehension as well as answering comprehension questions and this is done in a variety of ways in KS2 from using texts, text extracts, images and videos. 
 
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.
In KS2 reading skills may be also be developed through whole class reading time (out loud or quiet sessions), our writing scheme, comprehension lessons, daily reading opportunities, other shared texts and high quality topic books linked to curriculum units.
 
We use our progression of skills to make sure we are challenging and helping all children to achieve the skills required for their key stage and year group.
 
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.
 
Impact:
We aim that the Reading curriculum at Ide Hill CE Primary will inspire children to discuss their learning in reading confidently with others. Children will speak and listen with enjoyment through spoken word, poetry and performance and engage with a variety of genres. It will ensure all children can read easily, fluently and with good understanding. Children will appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage. When children leave Ide Hill CE Primary they are readers for life and show a great enthusiasm for reading.
 
Children will use a range of different effective and efficient support strategies such as phonics, thesauruses and dictionaries to support reading new words and vocabulary. Children will read diligently as part of the Reading Planet Rocket Phonics Scheme, book banded schemes and take pride in their progress. They use the SPAG tools in a confident way to decode prosody when reading. Children use their literacy learning confidently and enjoy reading for pleasure. Children are aware of and use a range of strategies and questions to support with their comprehension skills, using VIPERS. Children will feel confident and prepared to use literacy in the next steps of their learning journey.
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