Reading Intent Statement
At Thames View Junior School, in order to ‘Strive for Excellence’, we believe that all children should be equipped with the skills to access the secondary curriculum by the time they leave primary school. In order to achieve this, we deliver, to our children, the skills to retrieve, infer and deduce information from texts, to comprehend what they have read, to decode and recognise the written word and to be able to actively discuss what they have read. To read across a wide range of genres, fiction and non-fiction and to have fostered a love of reading that will stay with them for life.
Vipers in Reading
Reading at Thames View is taught every day. To support the learning we use VIPERS from Literacy Shed Plus.
What are Vipers?
VIPERS is an anagram 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:
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.
Here are some helpful tips for reading with your child at home
Looking for something new to read with your child? Click our recommended reads to see what is on our lists.
Our Reading Overviews
Accelerated Reader
At Thames View Junior, we use the Accelerated Reader programme which is an educational programme created by Renaissance Learning. It is designed to monitor and manage students’ independent reading practice and comprehension and the programme assesses students’ performance through quizzes and tests based on the books they have read. Each half term pupils will complete a regular reading assessment using the STAR reader software in school. This will be used to determine the reading age and reading level of the child to enable them to take appropriate books home.
Phonics
Phonics is taught using the Read Write Inc Scheme for selected pupils.
Click here to visit our phonics page.