Please attend our Reading and Phonics meeting on Wednesday 16th October 9:30 – 10:00 (after the Phonics learn-a-long at 9:00am)
Reading at home with your child should be a celebration of the skills that the children are learning at school; an opportunity to reinforce, practise and refine. Children will read books at a level where they can blend the phonemes and read words independently. In order to develop confidence and mastery of these skills, your child will bring home one reading book a week that is closely matched to their phonetic ability and they will know all of the phonemes the book contains. Please read this book with them every day to develop their blending, decoding and fluency skills. Reading the same book daily for several days helps to develop fluency and embed phonic knowledge and skills. We ask that you record this in their reading log book which will be sent home with them when they are allocated their first reading book. Please write a positive comment everyday about your child’s reading. When your child reads with their teacher, they will look at this to see how they are engaging with their reading at home and read comments made by parents/carers. We will occasionally write a comment in the log book too.
The video below explains the value of re-reading the same book and what you should focus on each time. We really encourage you to watch it.
Top tips
- Let the child do the work – they have learnt the phonemes (sounds) in the book so will be able to say them and blend some phonemes to make words.
- Try to keep talk to a minimum – the child needs to be able to hear the phonemes. Saying “well done” after every letter disables the flow of hearing the sounds enabling blending.
- Lots of non-verbal encouragement – smile and nod!
- Encourage children to re-read the words in each sentence after decoding them (working them out) fluently or re-read it for them to aid comprehension
- Encourage your child to point to each letter 1:1 as they read.
- Reread the book multiple times to build confidence.
- Encourage children to find and use the phonemes (sounds) they have been learning when you are out and about.