Vision

At Hollyfast, we intend to create confident readers, who have the ability to develop a deep and true understanding of what they read and appreciate the importance and value of reading for pleasure. We aim to foster and promote a love of reading, fluency and a secure ability to comprehend information. We strive to create a love of reading through encouraging reading at home and working closely with parents to do this is vital. In order to foster a love of reading across various genres, we aim to expose children to a wide range of texts and purchase books accordingly. As part of our equality ethos, we are committed to purchasing books that represent our children and community through characters and authors. 

 

Our Reading Approach

Our learning around reading, both in terms of decoding, fluency and comprehension, is based on the objectives as outlined in the National Curriculum. Our Reading skills lessons take place every day in every year group across the school for 20 to 30 minutes. Within these sessions, our teachers model reading strategies during shared whole class reading sessions. These involve high quality, age-appropriate texts which are carefully selected by our staff. These are read to or with the children and provide an opportunity to teach children specific reading skills to widen their vocabulary and develop their levels of comprehension, as outlined in the National Curriculum. Questions are selected to help children access a range of skills to help them to develop a greater understanding of a range of reading materials including fiction, non-fiction and poetry materials.

 

During these sessions, children read in a variety of different ways. They may hear the teacher model fluent reading and then have time to re- read the same extract themselves, they may read individually and feedback, work in groups, take turns in pairs or read aloud to the their peers. In our reading lessons, we use reading VIPERS (based on materials from ‘The Literacy Shed’) to help support our pupils to understand what a good reader looks like and how to approach answering reading questions.

 

VIPERS is an acronym which stands for:

Vocabulary

Infer

Predict

Explain

Retrieve

Sequence (KS1) or Summarise (KS2).

 

Class Reader

This is a 10 minute per day allocation where the class novel is read to the children.

 

Lunchtime Reading Library

Our Year 6 children run our school library, providing an opportunity for all children to read at lunchtime. Our library is stocked with an exciting range of non-fiction books, which the children can borrow.

 

Tips to support with Reading at home

Reading at Home

Children will be given an age-appropriate reading book to take home and it is helpful if parents can make a brief comment in the child's reading record to let us know how they are getting on with their reading at home.  We expect children to read three times a week and to bring their reading books into school every day.

 

VIPERS Question Stems

It would be excellent if, as parents, you could also refer to these VIPERS regularly when you are listening to your child read at home. VIPERS questions can be applied to any text that a child is reading as well as with pictures, picture books and films. When any adult is listening to a child read, all they have to do is think of questions about the book, picture or film that cover some of the VIPERS and there are some great examples below of how you can create your own questions using the following question openers.

 

 

 

If you have any questions or are struggling with this, please contact your child’s class teacher and they will provide some additional support materials to use at home.