Helping at home

Home Reading

Research  confirms our school’s underlying philosophy that repetition of reading a book leads to greater learning of vocabulary because the children pick up new information with each reading.

Children are given individual reading books that may contain few words and they may seem to ‘finish’ them quickly. There are many skills that your child needs to develop as a reader and with repeated readings you can focus on these different skills. In this way children will become fluent readers who can not only decode words but understand and enjoy a variety of texts. The Rose Report, an independent review of the teaching of reading, describes this as a journey from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn, for pleasure and purpose’.

• Let the reading time be short (about 5-10 minutes), enjoyable, and stress free for both you and your child.
• Choose a time when your child is willing and not too tired.
• Sit close together in a relaxed atmosphere and let your child take their time (remove any distractions such as TV). Our local library is great resource to use straight after school. 
• Talk about the book and the pictures, allow your child to look through the book before you begin to read. 
• When your child first brings home a reading book, do not expect them to know all the words.
• Model the reading by reading it to them at first or taking it in turns. Many first books have a repeated phrase which you can help them to anticipate by reading up to the word that varies, for example ‘I like to paint’, ‘I like to ……swim’.
• Remember that much of the early reading your child does is memorising. It is more important that they read the whole book remembering the sequence of the story than that they should recognise each word and what it says. With repeated readings the memorised words will start to become familiar as text.
• Encourage your child to use the pictures to help guess the words.
• Please fill in your child's reading record, we value your feedback.
• In the very early stages, it is fine to simply tell your child an unknown word and explain what it means. As he/she progresses you may encourage him/her to use the picture or the first letter of a word to help them.
• Do not let your child struggle with trying to sound out words that are not phonetically decodable, for example ‘tricky words’ such as ‘come’ and ‘who’ which cannot be sounded out as c-o-m-e and w-h-o.
• Above all, always use plenty of praise and encouragement.

As their reading progresses encourage your child to:

• Use the sounds that they know, or tricky words, to piece together words and sentences.
• Predict what might happen next say how the story might end.
• Cover a word and think of another that would make sense.
• Discuss characters; what they are like, how they are feeling.
• Make links to other books, for example by the same author or about the same subject, and to their own experiences.
• Pay attention to the punctuation, speech bubbles and so on, using different voices for different characters. 
• Use the correct terminology such as author, illustrator, title, character.
• Express opinions about the book and who they would recommend it to.
• Use the theme of the book to write/draw own version, perhaps using a different setting or characters.
   

Alongside your child's school reading book, we strongly recommend reading to them. Reading schemes help your child towards independent reading but ‘real books’ give them a flavour of the wealth of literature that they will one day be able to access independently and, as mentioned above, repeated readings can lead to greater learning.This can be a cosy, bedtime activity for sharing and enjoyment of a book. The child can be the listener and will learn a great deal from hearing an experienced reader read aloud, such as seeing how the pages are turned, how expression is used and different voices used for different characters, how the plot develops and so on.
You may find that your child will begin to join in with a favourite book. With a new book you may want to ask your child how they think the story will end, about whether they liked the story or particular characters.

Let your child see you read, and share it with them, for example reading a recipe, reading the newspaper headlines, reading the destination on the bus, reading shop signs and labels on items in the shop. Read in different place (share a book on the train, go to the park and read, build a reading den a read with a torch). 

Children love to learn new skills through a game. Here are some suggestions:

I-Spy: for early readers use the letter sound but once the children are confident with the sounds use the letter names.
Make up silly rhymes and phrases using alliteration (big, bright, blue, balloons).
Go on a 'sound hunt'. Find objects around the house that start with the same sound. 
Use ‘robot-talk’ to talk to each other, for example (i-t    i-s    r-e-d)

Children can borrow up to 20 books from Crosby Library!

Teaching Reading and Writing through Phonics

Jargon Buster (sorry!):

Phoneme - smallest unit of sound

Grapheme - how a sound is recorded

Diagraph - 2 letters that make 1 sound

Trigraph - 3 letters that make 1 sound

Split diagraph - when an 'e' is used to make a long vowel sound

CVC words - (consonant vowel consonant) 

Blending - blending sounds to read words

Segmenting - segment words to spell

Some Examples: 

CAT has 3 phonemes - C-A-T

SHOP has 3 phonemes - SH-O-P

FAIR has 3 phonemes - F-AIR

CAT, BAG, LIP are CVC words

ai, ay, a-e are all graphemes (ways of recording) for the same phoneme (sound) 

SH in shop is a diagraph (2 letters making 1 sound)

AIR in fair is a trigraph (3 letters making 1 sound)

I-E in slide is a split daigraph (the 'e' changing the word from slid to slide) 

Phase 1 (usually secured pre-school)

Phase One of Letters and Sounds concentrates on developing children's speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonic work which starts in Phase 2. The emphasis during Phase 1 is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills.

Phase 1 is divided into seven aspects. Each aspect contains three strands: Tuning in to sounds (auditory discrimination), Listening and remembering sounds (auditory memory and sequencing) and Talking about sounds (developing vocabulary and language comprehension).

Phase 2 (usually secured during Reception)

In Phase 2, letters and their sounds are introduced one at a time. A set of letters is taught each week, in the following sequence:

Set 1: s, a, t, p
Set 2: i, n, m, d
Set 3: g, o, c, k
Set 4: ck, e, u, r
Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss

The children will begin to learn to blend and segment to begin reading and spelling.  This will begin with simple words.

Words using set 1