Reading Curriculum Intent

At Darley Dale, we believe that reading is an essential life skill and we are committed to enabling our children to become lifelong readers. We also want our children to be able to speak and write fluently in order to share their ideas and emotions with others.

Reading is a skill that enables children to develop their learning across the wider curriculum and lays the foundations for success in future lines of study and employment. We recognise the importance of a consistent teaching of reading in order to close any gaps and to target the highest possible number of children attaining the expected standard or higher.

At the heart of our strategy is our drive to foster a love of reading, enriching children’s learning through carefully designed teaching activities that utilise imaginative stories and thought provoking texts. Pupils should read a wide range of texts for pleasure in order to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually.  This will enable them to communicate confidently and effectively, to allow them to become a successful global citizen.

Reading Curriculum Implementation

We start teaching phonics from Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. We want children to use word recognition skills to read with fluency and confidence, including sight recognition to read familiar words and phonic skills to decode unfamiliar words. Children who are at the start of their reading journey also follow Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised to ensure they have the foundations to become fluent, confident readers. 

At Darley Dale, Reception and Year 1 follow Little Wandle guided reading sessions.  Children will take part in reading practice sessions 3 times a week. This will focus on three key reading skills – decoding, prosody and comprehension. This will allow children to have quality practice sessions, which are closely matched to their phonic ability.

From Year 2,  we use VIPERS (created by Rob Smith, The Literacy Shed)  as range of reading prompts based on the 2016 reading content domains found in the National Curriculum Test Framework documents for KS1 and KS2. VIPERS is an acronym to aid the recall of the six reading domains as part of the UK’s reading curriculum. These are the key areas which we feel children need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts. The six 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.

Characteristics of a Reader:

• Excellent phonic knowledge and skills
• Fluency and accuracy in reading across a wide range of contexts throughout the curriculum
• Knowledge of an extensive and rich vocabulary
• An excellent comprehension of texts
• The motivation to read for both study and for pleasure
• Extensive knowledge through having read a rich and varied range of texts