Helping your Child with Reading

Reading with your child is vital. Research shows that it's the single most important thing you can do to help your child's education. It's best to read little and often, so try to put aside some time for it every day.

Think of ways to make reading fun - you want your child to learn how pleasurable books can be. If you're both enjoying talking about the content of a particular page, linger over it for as long as you like.

Books aren't just about reading the words on the page, they can also present new ideas and topics for you and your child to discuss.

Tips for helping your child to enjoy books:

• Encourage your child to pretend to 'read' a book before he or she can read words.
• Visit the library as often as possible - take out CDs and DVDs as well as books.
• Schedule a regular time for reading - perhaps when you get home from school or just before bed.
• Buy dual-language books if English isn’t your family’s first language - you can talk about books and stories, and develop a love for them, in any language.
• Look for books on topics that you know your child is interested in - maybe dragons, insects, cookery or a certain sport.
• Make sure that children’s books are easily accessible in different rooms around your house.

Thanks to the BBC's learning website for this information. For more info on helping your child with their learning, click here

Book Levels and Colour Bands

At Glenfrome Primary School all our reading books are colour banded according to their level of reading difficulty. Your child will be given a colour band and book level to choose from which will help to ensure that the book they select is at the right reading level. Every colour band includes books from a range of reading schemes so that they will experience a range of stories, text types and illustrations. Once they become proficient at one level, by reading a wide range of books within it, they will move onto the next. Therefore, the more practise they get, the better they get and the quicker they will progress through the levels!

Please remember that 5 or 10 minutes reading each evening will help your child become a more proficient reader.  Reading a familiar book is good for learning to read with fluency and expression.  Twice as many children are reading at home now, and teachers have noticed improvements in the reading skills of children who are reading more regularly.

Thank you to all the parents who are helping to instil a love of reading! 

How do we teach phonics at Glenfrome?

• In Reception children are introduced to Phase One of the Letters and Sounds programme as soon as they start school.
• Phase One supports the development of speaking and listening and awareness of sounds. Our aim is to teach your children the important basic elements of letters and sounds such as oral segmenting and blending of familiar words.
• Phase Two and Phase Three- when the children are ready we introduce them to the next stages. This is when we teach at least 19 letters, and move children on from oral blending and segmentation to blending and segmenting with letters to make words. By the end of the phase many children should be able to read some VC and CVC words.  They also may be able to spell them either using magnetic letters or by writing the letters on paper or on whiteboards. We use Jolly Phonics to implement letter/grapheme recognition and letter sounds/phonemes.

Please see the links below to support you further in understanding the importance of learning about letters and sounds.

http://www.oup.com/oxed/primary/rwi/forparents/

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/freeIndex.htm

http://www.mrthorne.com/