Reading Progression

Vipers (created by Rob Smith, The Literacy Shed) 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 six reading domains as part of the 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 stand for Vocabulary, Infer, Predict, Explain, Retrieve and Sequence (KS1) or Summarise (KS2).

In KS1, ‘Explain’; is not one of the content domains, rather it asks children why they have come to a certain conclusion, to explain their preferences, thoughts and opinions about a text. In KS2, the Explain section covers the additional content domains, which are not present in KS1.
The six 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.