At Summerfields Primary Academy, we are passionate about and prioritise reading. The school is determined that every pupil will learn to read, regardless of their background, needs and abilities. The reading culture promoted at the school demonstrates a love of books and reading through the promotion of core texts, reading to support the writing process and independent reading.  

On this page, you will find out about our reading curriculum, intent, policies, provision, ideas, resources and support for reading at home. 

Our Anchor books and the Summerfields Reading Offer

At Summerfields, we build our year around books – long sustained engagements with an author, a set of characters, a perspective, and a voice - because we believe that the lessons we learn from the people in the pages we read, will inspire us to be someone extraordinary in the future. We believe that books help us find our place in time.

Our core reading offer to all our pupils is that they will discover and explore ten themes or styles of text throughout their time at Summerfields. Each child will return to these themes within each phase throughout their primary years. These books are specifically chosen to open up the world to our pupils and engage them with texts, topics and authors they may not have encountered before that will underpin and develop their understanding of each exploration. Texts have been matched to these themes to create confident, adaptable readers who can successfully navigate a range of texts. The following themes and styles of texts have been chosen for Summerfields pupils:

Different styles of text

• Archaic - The vocabulary, usage, syntax and context for cultural reference of texts over 50 or 100 years old are vastly different and typically more complex than texts written today. Students need to be exposed to and develop proficiency with antiquated forms of expression
• Complex - Books are sometimes complex in their plot and narrator choices.  Some books have multiple intertwined and apparently (for a time) unrelated plot lines. These are far harder to read than books with a single plot line and students need to experience these as well.
• Resistant - Texts written to deliberately resist easy meaning-making by readers. Children have to assemble meaning around nuances, hints, uncertainties and clues.
• Non-linear – some books do not follow a traditional beginning to end time pattern, and these can be much more convoluted to follow. In non-linear texts, time moves in fits and start. It doubles back.

Book themes – to open up the world

• Shakespeare
• Loss
• Migration
• Strong female
• LGBTQ
• BAME

Texts chosen have been revised and revisited by staff to reflect enjoyment levels, needs of cohorts, challenging content and changes in the wider curriculum. This ensures the anchor book selections are relevant and up to date whilst reflecting the needs of Summerfields and the aspirational curriculum we provide for our pupils. Texts are also matched to their Lexile scores, which are layered on to each year group from year 2 upwards based on research into appropriate scores. Lexile scores give an indication of the difficulty of the text, but not the content. Some texts which may not be exactly the correct level of Lexile score have been included due to their content and level of content covered. This ensures that our reading curriculum is sufficiently challenging in a wide variety of ways and promoted enjoyment, reading for pleasure, reading for meaning, reading for knowledge and the development of vocabulary.

Class teachers will also cover a wide variety of other texts through guided reading sessions. These may be linked by theme, author or content or may be used to support and cover the national curriculum reading objectives. A reading spine using the full curriculum offer and linked to Lexile scores has been created to provide staff with a bank of appropriate texts they can use to teach a wide range of objectives. By spiralling the themes through our children’s education, we are continually building their schemas of knowledge, exploring their views, widening their perspectives, giving them cultural capital and preparing them for the next stage of their education.

Reading comprehension questions - VIPERS

What are Vipers?

At Summerfields, children are taught the skills of reading (outlined in the National Curriculum and the KS1 and KS2 test domains) through the use of VIPERS which were created by Rob Smith (The Literacy Shed).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.

Below are examples of the different types of questions covered through VIPERS.