How to Help Your Child with Phonics and Reading
Children in Reception, Y1 and Y2 are taught to read in daily whole class phonics lessons. Children learn the sounds (phonemes) that different letters, and groups of letters (graphemes) make e.g. oa as in goat or igh as in light. They learn to blend these sounds to read words. Some children in Y3 to Y6 are also taught phonics to help them catch up with their reading. Teachers use the Little Wandle scheme to teach their daily phonics sessions. Below you will find links to videos from Little Wandle to help you and your child with their phonics.
https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/
Children in Reception, Y1 and Y2 take part in group reading practice three times a week. These focus on decoding (working out what words say), prosody (expression or story voice) and comprehension (understanding what you have read). The groups are small and are led by a teacher or a teaching assistant. The children focus on the same book each session so they become familiar with it. They then take this book home to share with an adult.
Where children in KS2 still struggle to decode they have additional small group or individual sessions to support them. Older children may also access one to one daily reading sessions with our specialised reading teaching assistant, Miss Day.
Whole class reading lessons are taught daily in KS2 and twice weekly in KS1. These are based on books from the reading spine (see the link above) to reinforce learning in history and geography projects, and sometimes in other curriculum areas. In these lessons teachers model expert reading of these texts which introduce children to high quality classic, modern and diverse fiction. Children then read the text together with the teacher, with a partner or on their own. In these lessons children explore the background to the text and its author, read short extracts together and practise the skills they will need to become confident readers, including fluency, vocabulary, comprehension and inference. They complete verbal or written activities to make sure they have understood what they have read in the lesson.
Reading for Pleasure
It is really important that children enjoy reading and choose to read for themselves. We have updated the books in our library to make sure we have books children choose to read and that our books are diverse with a mixture of up to date and classic titles. Our Reading Squad help us to choose books and make our school libraries inviting places to be! Remember children can choose a book from the school library every week.
Our Patron of Reading
We are so excited to welcome our Patron of Reading, Gareth Baker, a fantastic author who will be working with the children every half term this year in assemblies and workshops. The idea of a Patron of Reading is to help us create a buzz about books and reading. Everything the patron does is linked to encouraging and developing a reading for pleasure culture in the school. These include book quizzes, blogs, book recommendations, plays, poetry bashes, blogs, book trailers and visits. The possibilities are virtually endless!!
Click on the link here to read more about Gareth and his brilliant books……