Highfields Primary School Learning to Read Information for Parents October 2013 Please take a seat. Please switch phones to silent. Thank you.

How do we learn to read?

For young children, phonics is an important part of this process. At Highfields children pursue a rapid ‘learn to read’ programme so they can ‘read to learn’ for the rest of their lives.

Phonics Consists of: Identifying sounds in spoken words Recognising the common spellings of each phoneme. Synthesising phonemes into words for reading. Segmenting words into phonemes for spelling.

Some Definitions A Phoneme you hear This is the smallest unit of sound in a word. There are 43 phonemes in the English language. How many phonemes can you hear in cat ? Pronounced in their purest form – no schwa.

A grapheme you see. These are the letters that represent the phoneme. The grapheme could be 1 letter, 2 letters or more. There are 44 phonemes in English and about 150 different graphemes to represent these sounds. It’s a complex code.

Consider reading and writing: or door more dawn author

If English had a simple code spelling and reading would be much easier. play mayk trayn cafay strayt wayt brayk green dreem kee hee happee light kight fligh Igh igh tigh blow smowk flowt gow mowst moon broot bloo groo But it doesn’t!!

What does my child need to be able to do? Synthesising (blending for reading) Fluent recall of the 44 phonemes. Recognising the letter sounds in a written word e.g c-u-p sh-ee-p. Merging them into the correct order to pronounce the word cup and sheep.

What does my child need to be able to do? Segmenting (for spelling) Identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word (e.g. h-i-m, s-t-or-k) Fluent recall of the grapheme representing each sound. Forming each grapheme with the correct sequence of movements so they can efficiently write down letters for each sound (phoneme) to form the word.

In addition to this, each the week the children learn ‘tricky’ spelling words (those that are not spelt phonetically) and key sight vocabulary. The key sight and high frequency word lists can be found in the handouts today. In total there are 300 words to learn! 100 in Rec/Year1 and an additional 200 in Year 2

What happens in a phonics session? coat the Play a game! Revisit and review Teach Practise Apply Apply Apply

Ideas for games. Count the sound buttons – c a t = 3 t r ai n = 4 ch o p = 3 h or se = 3 (sort into different pots) Can you make a dog dig? Which phonemes do we need to change to change a pot into a pit? Crossing the river – you can cross the river if… Rhyming Pebble – older children explore spelling Silly questions – is a dog red? Can a pen hop?

How can you help? By saying the 44 English sounds in a pure way. (google phonics pronunciation) Knowing the letters and groups of letters (graphemes) used to read and write the sounds. Playing a sound game. Practical or ICT based. Using simple sound / word flash cards little and often.

And…. By having fun with Sound Talk at home. “What a tidy r-oo-m!” “Where’s your c-oa-t?” “Time for b-e-d!” By reading to your child lots of lovely stories and asking lots of questions! What is happening? What do you think happens next? What is that character thinking? What is the character saying? What do you think that character is feeling now?

And…. By talking to your child as much as possible and ‘feeding’ them new and different words: “Let’s eat our lunch now.” “Let’s munch our lunch now.” “Let’s scoff our lunch now.” “Let’s devour our lunch now!” I’m not just ….. I’m …….. Attendance and punctuality. Even repeated lateness can mean your child misses this bit.

By enriching conversations through description: “Look at that rain. It looks like little diamonds sparkling on the window pane!” By having fun with words and language. “I’m as hot as a spud in a cooking pot!” By explaining idioms that might be obvious to us but strange to a child. For example, what does ‘dotted about’ mean? By praising your child for using new words or interesting images. And what about my older child / more advanced reader? Find it … Prove it questions build comprehension power! By encouraging a story voice – we do not write or spell as we speak. Investigate split-e (‘magic e’) words.

This is great for some activities that you can do at home.

owl/reading

Further opportunities at Highfields Pupil progress meetings next week – make sure you leave knowing what your child needs next and what you can do to help. Open Door – a good time to sneak a peek at the reading resources being used in your child’s classroom. Year 1 Phonic Check meeting Year 2 SATs preparation meeting.

Thank you for your participation this morning. Please spread the word that this session will be repeated at 5:30pm to enable as many parents as possible to come along. Please help yourselves to handouts!