'Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body' — Richard Steele

We teach the skills for reading comprehension using a whole class reading approach where we all share the same text and analyse it together. The texts chosen may be the class reader, a poem or other texts that help us with our learning across the curriculum. The text is shared by the class teacher and children together, with everyone taking turns to read or listen to others and then we work together to interrogate and understand the meaning of what we have read.

In Key Stage 1 we use ICLUE to support our understanding and ask questions about what we have read together and we use VIPERS in Key Stage 2. 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.