How To Support Your Child With Their Reading

Our aim in the Early Years is to have a love for reading and stories. To instill this love for reading we promote library books going home for you to share and read to your daughter on a weekly basis.

• Reception children begin by learning the single letter sounds (t, a, s) and, once these are secure, move onto double/triple letter sounds (digraphs & trigraphs), where two or three letters together make a different sound eg: sh (fish), ai (rain) or igh (night). It is very important that when you are practising these with your child that you say the soft sound and don’t add an ‘uh’ at the end (eg: mmmm not muh) as this can distort the sounds when it comes to blending them together to read a word.
• The next step is learning what to do with the letter sounds in order to read or write words (blending and segmenting). Some children pick this up very quickly and may even be able to do this before they can recognise the letters, but for others it is a longer journey and they may not have mastered it until they reach Year 1. Be patient…it will happen even if it seems like it’s never going to!
• Reading books will be sent home once the above is achieved, your daughter will then receive a RWI book that is covered during the week’s lessons , this will be a known text of their level that they can reread and enjoy sharing this with you at home confidently . They will also receive  a RWI book bag book that is an unseen text that will match your daughter’s RWI level during the week. These RWI books use the sounds that the girls have covered so far and are able to sound out and blend to read the words. These books will also contain red words that have been covered in class. Red words are words that can not be sounded out.

• Reading should be a fun experience. Some children love to read their book as soon as they get home, others prefer to play for a while and then do it, and for some, reading first thing in the morning is better. Find a time that works best for you. If your child is too tired or really doesn’t want to do it, just leave it and come back to it later.
• Talking about the pictures is key. Not only can children tell the story using just the pictures, but they provide clues about what the text might say. Asking lots of questions as you read also helps – these can be talking about what you can see on a current page, recalling what has already happened or predicting what might happen next.
• Encourage your child to point to the words as they read. This enables them to track each one and also helps them to focus on what they are reading, rather than flying through as they can remember the predictive pattern of the text.

• Very quickly your child will be reading simple sentences made up of simple phonetic words (those that they can ‘sound out’, eg: c-a-t…cat), tricky words (words like I, the, go, no, was, that are commonly occurring words that are taught in class and need to be learnt as they cannot be sounded out and also known as “red words”) and harder/longer words that your child isn’t yet ready to work out or hasn’t been taught yet. Again, the pictures can be used to help work these out, or it may be better to tell them the word in order to keep the flow going or to avoid frustration.
• Re-reading the same pages or books more than once builds confidence. If your child has had to work out a lot of words on a page, re-reading it to them, pointing to each word as you go provides a good model of how to read and helps consolidate learning.