At Cannon Lane we are committed to developing children's love of reading and there is a strong focus on supporting this within school and also at home. Our goal is to develop fluent readers who have strong comprehension skills. As 85% of the wider curriculum is reading-based, we know how important reading is to the success of every child, regardless of external factors.

In Year 2-6, reading is taught both through the teaching in the wider curriculum and also through discreet guided reading sessions. Children experience a combination of whole-class guided reading and grouped guided reading sessions. 

For whole class guided reading, the children focus on their class text and explore the text further using the six key reading domains as set out in VIPERS. 

For grouped guided reading, children read a Big Cat Harper Collins book, selected by their teacher. This is then allocated to them online on the Collins Hub, for them to continue reading at home. 

VIPERS

VIPERS is a range of reading prompts based on the 2016 Reading Content domains found in the National Curriculum Test Framework documents for KS1 and KS2. VIPERS is an acronym to aid the recall of the 6 reading domains as part of the UK’s Reading Curriculum.

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.

They are the key areas which we feel children need to know and understand to improve their comprehension of texts. At Cannon Lane, children’s exposure to VIPERS starts in Reception where specific reference and appropriate sentence-stems are also used alongside the Little Wandle phonics scheme and comprehension development in Reception and Year 1. These skills are built upon and deepened progressively each year to ensure that pupils leave primary education with strong comprehension skills, across a range of texts. Our curriculum is designed so that key, fundamental knowledge is often revisited, allowing deliberate opportunities for retrieval practice, therefore embedding key learning.

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.

Teachers use VIPERS to support children’s comprehension skills in whole class reading lessons. Children are exposed to new vocabulary, retrieval and inference questions in every session. The children then further develop the different aspects of VIPERS through carefully chosen tasks often linked to specific year group shared texts.

The attached documents provide an overview of how reading is taught at Cannon Lane School.  In addition to this, you can find questions that parents can ask children when reading together at home.

Useful Links