At Dymchurch Primary we recognise that reading is the gateway to being able to access all that school and the wider world has to offer.  To ensure our children have the strongest opportunities available to them, we use a range of reading strategies to ensure our children have a love of reading and become successful readers.  We use the Little Wandle scheme to enable to children to develop a strong understanding of phonics which will help them to become competent readers, writers and spellers.  From Year 2 through to Year 6 we use the 'VIPERS' approach to teach reading. This strengthens the children's comprehension skills including the understanding of vocabulary, finding literal information, strengthen their deductive and inferential skills. 

To promote a love of reading every class has daily story time in which high quality texts, across a range of genres, are read to the children.  We also have a library which children have daily access to.  

All other skills and texts covered at Dymchurch can be found in the documentation below.

Reading intent:

• To foster a love for reading, developing comprehension skills, and ensuring that every pupil becomes a fluent and proficient reader.

• To create a reading-rich environment that nurtures a passion for literature, fosters curiosity, and enables children to access a wide range of texts.

• All pupils, regardless of background or starting point, make substantial progress in reading, acquire a broad vocabulary, and develop strong comprehension skills.

• A curriculum that is ambitious, well-sequenced, and purposefully designed to develop pupils into confident readers who can engage critically with a variety of texts.

• Reading is integrated across the wider curriculum, with opportunities for reading for pleasure embedded throughout the school day.

• High-quality phonics provision is central to the early reading curriculum, ensuring that pupils develop strong foundational skills.

• Additional support is provided for pupils who need it through targeted interventions and small group work.

At Dymchurch we subscribe to Accelerated Reader to further develop the children's reading skills. Find out more about the program by clicking on the link below.

Reading Vipers

What are Vipers?

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.

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.

For more information on Vipers, click here.

Audible.com - some great classic stories

Audio Books - more classics