Reading Across KS2

As pupils enter KS2, they will engage with a text-based curriculum. RWI still progresses and those skills are used now for decoding and spelling. The text-based curriculum continues the focus of children reading every day while at school. The books for the curriculum are chosen based on the criteria below: 

1) Progression of Reading: As children move through the school, the texts that they read should get gradually more difficult as they become better readers. while this wouldn't be the case for every single book in the sequence, it does happen between year groups. The school use accelerated Reader, a computer-based programme that helps monitor and progress reading. The programme assigns all books a difficulty level. The level is a measure of the complexity of the text and is determined by the characteristics that most heavily influence readability: average sentence length, average word length and word difficulty level. This difficulty level comes from analysis of the world's largest database of words from actual books (more than 170, 000 books comprising of nearly 2.5 billion words).As pupils move up through the school we choose books to ensure that this level increases. 

2) Increasing Reading Stamina: As pupils move up the school, the books they engage with in English become increasingly  longer, helping develop reading stamina 

3) Linking to Other Learning: The vast majority of books we have chosen link to specific topics being taught at the same time in Geography, History, Science of PSHE. This allows discussion, additional time for learning in context and increased background knowledge 

4) Genre Types: The books chosen are a mixture of genre types so that pupils gain experience of different writing intentions 

5) Themes of the Text: As pupils become older their increased maturity means they can engage with more emotive and advanced themes.

6) Concern Citizens: we have intentionally chosen some books that involve the impact of human actions upon the environment to create awareness of these issues

7) Diversity: the books have been deliberately chosen to reflect a diversity of author ethnicity and gender. We have also ensured the gender of the leading protagonists is evenly proportioned.

8) Reading Pleasure:  the books chosen have been researched and recommended for level of enjoyment

Through Reading comprehension we promote '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

These aspects are taught within English lessons. Mirroring the National Curriculum Assessments, greater emphasis is placed upon Inference and Retrieval, while Vocabulary and spelling are also a school-specific foci for us.