At Sundridge & Brasted, reading is at the heart of all we do. We believe that for children to develop a love of learning they must first develop a love of reading. We ensure that children are able to listen to and read high quality texts every day and our curriculum is designed to fully immerse children into a story as their learning journey for the term continues.

Reading

At Sundridge and Brasted, once children have graduated from the RWI programme, we teach reading through the Whole Class Reading approach, with VIPERS being at the heart of that.

VIPERS stands for:

Vocabulary

Inference

Prediction

Explanation

Retrieval

Summarise or Sequence

Lessons revolve around the class novel, which the class teacher will read to the children for 15 minutes. This is sacred time that simply cannot be missed. At Sundridge and Brasted, we believe that this sharing of a beloved novel is a vital part of children loving reading. Questions will then be asked based on what they have read. In some lessons, children may take turns reading out loud, or in their heads.

Key benefits of using Whole Class Reading and VIPERS:

• Using VIPERS ensures that children have exposure to a variety of different types of questioning and that the teacher purposefully plans to ask different types of questions throughout the week.
• Using Whole Class Reading allows children who aren’t strong readers to be exposed to high quality, challenging texts as vocabulary is talking through with the children before the session.
• The use of class discussion allows for deeper understanding of what the question is asking, as well as support from peers when answering those questions. This is coupled with more independent thinking, where teachers can really get a good understanding of how the children are doing.

The Assessment of Reading and Ensuring Progress is made:

• We use Accelerated Reader to provide a detailed breakdown of how children are getting on. The termly ‘Star Reader Test’ gives a Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) which ensures that children are reading books that are at their level. Teachers regularly track and support children wherever they are at in their reading journey, so that they can be the best that they can be. 

Our Library

We are incredibly proud of our gorgeous, well resourced library. Our library is full of books that are part of the Accelerated Reader system that are suitable for all children from Reception right the way through to Year 6. 

We also have a wide variety of non fiction texts that are borrowed by classes through out the year to help with topic based research.

We have also recently opened an account with Sevenoaks Library and are really excited to see what lovely books we can borrow over the coming year.