Reading

Reading for Pleasure at Home – Recommended Reading Lists

Research continues to highlight the importance of reading for pleasure for both academic performance and personal development. We know that there is a positive relationship between reading frequency, reading enjoyment and attainment. Regularly reading stories or novels outside of school is associated with higher scores in reading assessments. Other benefits to reading for pleasure include: text comprehension and grammar, positive reading attitudes, pleasure in reading in later life and increased general knowledge

Recommended Reading Lists

We have collected a range of titles to form a recommended reading list for each year group. We hope that this will help you with book choices for your child.

Reception and Year 1

Please follow the link on Oxford Owl website for finding phonic appropriate books for Reception and Year 1 to be reading themselves: https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/books/read-with-oxford/

Many of the recommended books for this age-range are books that are to be shared with your child rather than being read by your child.

Accelerated Reader

Please follow the link  https://www.arbookfind.co.uk/UserType.aspx?RedirectURL=%2fdefault.aspx to find the levels for the books on the recommended reading lists.

At Westgate Primary School, we want all children to experience success by reading a variety of text-types and authors. You can help at home by providing your child with additional books to those from school through the local library, book shops, online/ e-books, audio books, i-pad (e.g. Newsround website, National Geographic Kids, First News) newspapers and magazines.

The expectation is that your child will read at home at least three times a week but we are hoping that they will read every day as “the more reading, the better.” Ideally each reading session should last for at least 20 minutes a day. Each child has a reading folder with a reading log and the class with the highest percentage of persistent readers will be rewarded with materials for their class reading corners and maybe even an extra play time!

Tips for reading at home:

• Try to build this into your daily routine.
• Have a quiet, comfortable space your child (and you) can read in.
• Read with your child and read in front of your child.
• Remember, both reading and hearing texts read aloud are important.

Before Reading

If it is the first time your child has read the book, look at the cover and title with them to predict what they think the book might be about. Make links to other books read with similar themes, the same characters and/or similar authors/illustrators. Give them time to flick through the book and read the blurb.

During Reading

Encourage your child to track the words with their finger or use a reading ruler. Help your child to decode (read) the words and ask them about the meaning of more challenging words. Ask them about the content of what they have read – who, what, where, when, why, how?

What are Vipers?

VIPERS is an anagram 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.