Reading 
Progression of skills in reading
This document gives a clear overview of the progression of substantive and disciplinary knowledge that our pupils are taught in Reading, throughout their primary education at Our Lady Queen of Peace Catholic Primary School.
Our curriculum is designed so that key, fundamental knowledge is often revisited, allowing deliberate opportunities for retrieval practice, therefore embedding key learning.
Vipers (created by Rob Smith, The Literacy Shed) is a 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 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. At OLQP, children’s exposure to VIPERS starts in Reception where s
pecific reference and appropriate sentence-stems are also used.
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.
Teachers use VIPERS to support children’s comprehension skills in whole class reading lessons. Children are exposed to new vocabulary, retrial and inference questions in every session. The children then further develop the different aspects of VIPERS through carefully chosen tasks often linked to specific year group shared text
In Reading, we encourage pupils to read for pleasure as ‘readers’. We develop their fluency and comprehension by listening to them in class and with the support of reading at home. Reading regularly out loud is extremely important and it helps pupils develop use of expression and an understanding of the different punctuation marks and their uses. In KS1, it is vitally important that pupils are given opportunities to read texts to become confident in reading and can develop understanding skills. Pupils may keep books for two days in a row to help their fluency and comprehension. In KS2, we continue to develop fluency and comprehension, but also endeavour to introduce the children to more novels through shared reading and books being read at home.