The Downs and Northbourne Church of England Primary Schools Reading Workshop – January 2016

Our Intentions for this afternoon To explore the ‘science’ behind reading. To explain how we teach your child to read. How you can help your child catch the reading bug!

It can be a long and frustrating task to help your child learn to read so it is important to put ourselves in their position to understand the challenge they face. The ‘science’ behind reading

   e  e     e    e  e   The   Welcome to The Downs. First they need to understand that the squiggles represent letters and that letters together make words. Imagine being presented with this and being asked to read it. This is what it is like for children looking at words. The first thing we do is start to unpick the meaning of individual letters.  = e Then we look at learning key words.  = the As we learn all the letters we will be able to decode the sentence.

Good readers need many individual skills. Each skill is like an individual thread – only when they are used together do we become a good reader. If we only focus on one skill your child may learn to read but they will not be a ‘good’ reader. This is often what we mean when children bark at the print. They can read the words but the words have no meaning to them so the text is not understood.

We all want your child to be a successful, GOOD readers and to enjoy the experience of reading but learning to read is a complicated skill and there is not one way which suits all children. However the first step is the same for everyone – for children to develop reading skills they need to have an understanding of the English language. For all of us this happens through talk. Through talk we learn new vocabulary and the knowledge of how to structure sentences. By sharing stories together your child will learn how stories are structured and story patterns. What are the individual threads? Knowing story pattern/language. Knowing sentence structure. Knowing a wide variety of words and their meaning. Recognising individual sounds/words. Knowing how to segment and blend sounds.

Step Two: Learning the individual sounds We focus on pure sounds not letter names. For example: e is sounded as ‘eh’ not ‘eee’ f is sounded as ‘ffff’ not ‘eff’ Once the children are happy using the sounds they can begin to segment words within their reading. c-a-t cat Step One: We talk about and share books! We act them out. We predict what might happen. We think about how we would feel if we were that character.

Step Three: Sound talk The separate sounds (phonemes) are spoken aloud, in order, all through the word, and are then merged together into the whole word. The merging is called blending, and is a vital skill for reading e.g: c-a-t = cat Children will also learn to do this the other way round. The whole word is spoken aloud and then broken up into its sounds (phonemes) in order, through the word e.g: cat = c-a-t This is called segmenting, and is a vital skill for spelling. They will also learn that some phonemes are made up of more than one letter, eg: /ll/ as in b-e-ll

Step Four: Sight vocabulary These are often called the high frequency words. They are the words the children will come across frequently and are difficult/impossible to sound out. They need to learn these by sight and recall them quickly when reading.

Use letter sounds and letter names. Write in lower case letters. Encourage your child to recognise letters in their environment; street names, signs, packets, brand labels. You will find many of your children are already reading as they recognise these things:

It is important to use the phonics resources that your child brings home.

1.Most importantly read with your child. Make it an enjoyable, daily routine that you both look forward to! 2.Sing an alphabet song together 3.Play ‘I spy’ using the letters that you know they have learnt. 4.Play with magnetic letters, using some two-grapheme (letter) combinations, eg: r-ai-n = rain blending for reading and rain = r-ai-n segmenting for spelling. 5.Praise your child for trying out words or recognising the words around them.

The Reading Bug is the one bug you want your child to catch so how can we work together to catch it? In school we read a variety of texts with the children. We encourage you to do the same at home. Show excitement around books and texts if you want your child to get this bug!

Sound Match Children will have a selection of pictures, individual letters and a missing letter from a word. They need to match the pieces together to make a word for each picture. Word building activities Children will have a selection of sounds which they need to put together to build the word.

Word Match Children will have a selection of pictures and words. They need to read the words and find the matching picture. Caption Match Children will have a selection of pictures and captions which they need to put together.

Reading Books Our reading scheme is in colours. Your children will progress through these levels at their own pace. Within each colour level there are numbers 1-4. This enables the class teacher to direct the children to specific books within their level.

Not all children will learn at the same rate! Every child is different and that’s what makes your child an individual. Your child should be supported whatever their rate of learning There is a very close link between difficulty with phonics and hearing, so if your child is making progress slower than expected, it is worth having their hearing checked.