Birchen Coppice Primary Academy

At Birchen Coppice Academy, English is taught is our discrete lessons daily but where appropriate, links are made to cross curricular learning. This ensures that children receive a vocabulary rich experience, exposure to quality texts that are immersive, and opportunities to write for different purposes.

Our focus on reading ensures that the skills of reading are taught, along with encouraging a love of reading through the school. Children will first read books linked to their phonic ability and then progress through a range of books within their book band ability. Initiatives such as Reading Miles, and Reading Ambassadors support our commitment to ensure every child leaves our school being a successful reader.

Writing is taught through planned sequences focusing on Fiction and Non-fiction text types, with Key texts identified to provide scaffolding and high quality examples to inspire used where appropriate.

Children focus on writing text types to:

• Entertain
• Inform
• Persuade (KS2)
• Discuss (Upper KS2)

Fiction writing is linked to identified quality fiction texts, as set out in our Termly Book overview. Non-fiction writing is linked to different purposes related to cross curricular topics. Progression for writing for each year group can be seen within the Writing progression map.

Reading is taught in KS2 through 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.

For Phonics and Early Reading please click here