Guided reading in KS2

Reading is a key priority at Moor End. It is integrated in all subjects across our curriculum, but our stand-alone guided reading sessions are taught daily from Year 3 to Year 6. The sessions are 30-45 minutes long depending on the size of the text they are looking at.

All our KS2 staff have been trained by Ashley Booth- a reading expert and we follow the curriculum that has been designed by him. More information can be found here: https://mrboothy6.wordpress.com/2023/07/24/meaningful-non-fiction-reading-sessions/ and here: A KS2 Reading Curriculum – The Teaching Booth (wordpress.com)

On Mondays and Fridays, we read our class novel and the children engage in ‘book talk’. This gives children chance to experience high-quality discussion with their teacher, which includes exploring retrieval based questions. Questions are created using 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.

Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are more focused sessions, where the children are immersed in a variety of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. They explore ‘linked texts’ which are three texts that sit well together. The three days can be linked through subject, author or text type such as, The Vikings, Michael Morpurgo or Poetry. We use this approach to ensure that the children are exposed to a variety of texts and don’t miss out on the best of the best.

One of the first activities we begin with in every session is exploring vocabulary. The children explore rich vocabulary that they may never normally come across. We have found this to be extremely beneficial for our children, particularly leading up to year 6 SATs. The rest of the lesson is then divided up between Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Summarising questions.

We also make it our priority to read our class novel for fifteen minutes per day. This is completely separate to our guided reading lessons so that the children are exposed to higher level texts, hear them read allowed by their class teacher on a daily basis and develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information.

See below for the themes and content each year group will cover.