Reading Information for Parents

Your child's reading experience is much more than the reading book which comes home from school. Reading is happening all the time in school. It is taught in specific daily guided reading and English lessons, but children are practicing and using their 'reading' constantly across all subject areas.

Parents can support this 'reading journey' through regular reading at home. In fact, support from parents with developing reading skills is hugely important to children. Reading to and with your child every day for at least ten minutes can make a dramatic difference to a child's achievement within school. At All Saints' we expect parents to listen to children read at a minimum of 3 times per week, for 15 minutes a time. Sharing stories with your child at bedtime, or indeed any time of the day,  is also something we actively encourage.

A report from the Oxford University Press highlighted the importance of parents reading with their children. 'Children who read outside of class are 13 times more likely to read above the expected level for their age'.

The report also offers six tips for reading with your child at home, including:

1. Make time to read- even ten minutes a day

2. Choose different types of books

3. Take turns to read

4. Talk about the book- ask your child questions

5. Pay attention to the language-ask your child what words mean

6. Enjoy reading!

In order to support parents we have created bookmarks with questions and ideas you can talk about with your child, these can be accessed at the bottom of this page, and are also found on your child's class page. 

Love Reading  4 Kids is a wonderful website which allows children (and parents) to read extracts of books before buying new books. The website also recommends new books that are suitable for children in primary school and shares trailers of books for children to explore.:

https://www.lovereading4kids.co.uk/

Oxford Owl Online provides access to free online reading material which directly complements reading schemes within school:

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/find-a-book/

The School Run provides lots of useful information for parents across the curriculum, the link below takes parents to information on the School Run specifically about reading:

https://www.theschoolrun.com/english/reading-comprehension

Learning to Read at All Saints' 

Children learn to read in different ways and at different ages. The first part of a child's journey towards being a successful reader starts when a child is a baby and is listening to stories and rhymes. This encourages a love of language and stories and develops a child's vocabulary and understanding of language as they start to become familiar with what words mean and what they look like.

A vital first stage of a child's development as a reader is to be able to 'read' pictures and to determine what is happening or to predict what might happen from the pictures in a book. As this skill develops, children become able to use their grammatical  skills to listen to words within a sentence and to make sense of what they can hear. This is an important tool for a young reader as it enables them to make sensible guesses at unknown words within a sentence and to continue to read for meaning without being stopped in their tracks.

Most pre-school children are already reading before they start school; they will be able to read the supermarket sign above the shops they visit frequently, familiar brands, e.g., McDonalds, Lego and Disney will be easily identifiable to them too! Whilst your young child won't necessarily be able to identify the letters and sounds within those words, they read them because they remember the overall shape of the word. At All Saints'  we ensure that children have a secure knowledge of a wide range of high frequency words that they identify without having to ask or sound them out so that they can maintain fluency within their reading, which in turn supports a good understanding of what they have read.

Guided reading takes place every single day at All Saints' at the start of the day. Children are engaged in a wide range of learning experiences through guided reading which develop their ability to decode words, explore new vocabulary and develop a love of reading. English lessons also develop children's engagement with reading and reading comprehension skills. Parents are invited to join children for guided reading sessions within the school year so parents understand how we develop reading at All Saints'.

In EYFS/KS1, reading books are changed weekly, with children taking home more than one 'leveled' reading  book when they are ready to do so. Children in KS2 are encouraged to change their reading books as frequently as they complete a chosen book. Children from year 1 make their own choices of home reading books from banded baskets however choices over time are monitored to encourage a wide ranging reading experience. 

Teaching Phonics at All Saints'

In addition to these basic reading skills the teaching of phonics  is a key focus for our developing readers and writers.  We ensure that all children in  EYFS,  year 1 and year 2 classes are taught phonic skills through a daily discrete phonics lessons. We use RWInc as our chosen phonics scheme at All Saints'. A phonics approach develops a child's ability to tackle unknown words within a text by blending the phonemes (sounds) within the word. These phonic skills also enable a child to work out the phonemes they will need to use when they are writing words. Parents are invited to phonics and reading workshops and to join phonics sessions throughout the year so parents understand what phonics is all about. 

The phonic lessons are structured as the RWInc scheme to ensure that children are first able to identify letters and to say the sound those letters make. Once children are confident with saying the single letter sounds and blending them to create words, they then start to learn the common digraphs (where two letters go together to create a new phoneme such as sh), trigraphs (where three letters create a new phoneme such as igh) and spelling patterns that we use within the English language.

The key objectives in our phonic, reading and writing lessons are that children are taught to:
 

• love books and enjoy listening to stories, poems and rhymes

• read and write letter-sound correspondences quickly

• decode effortlessly, spell and handwrite easily

• comprehend what they read

• read with fluency and expression

• write confidently using oral rehearsal

• work effectively with a partner or within a group to articulate their learning at every step