Reading at The Horsell Village School

October 2007

Our Aims for Reading

…to develop the desire to read …

At Horsell Village School we aim to teach, enable and encourage children to become fluent, independent and analytical readers who are enthralled by books.

Two main strands

Comprehension Decoding text

The alphabet

• Phonological awareness

• Phonics

Aim for Reception Year

• To encourage interest and enjoyment in a range of texts.• To enjoy sharing books with peers and adults.• To be able to discuss the pictures and story.• To have knowledge of how a book works, right way up,

front to back orientation.• To become familiar with the sounds, recognise letter

shapes and start to experiment with sounds, words and texts.

• Hear and say the sounds in the order in which they occur.• Read some high frequency words.• Listen with enjoyment and respond to stories, songs, music,

rhymes and poems.• Extend their vocabulary exploring meanings and sounds of

new words.

Reading Journey

Reading is Learned

• Reading Skills and Strategies, these are some of the strategies used in school which you can use at home.

• Blending: What word would we have if we put these sounds together: ‘s’, ‘a’, ‘t’ ?

• Sound Isolation: What is the first sound in ‘rose’?• Phoneme Counting: How many sounds can you

hear in ‘cake’?• Deleting Phonemes: What sound do you hear in

‘meat’ that is missing in ‘eat’?• Word-to-word matching: Do pen and pipe start

with the same sound ?• Sound to Sound Matching: is there a ‘k’ in bike?

Reading is LearnedChildren need to firstly be able to decode then respond and comprehend texts.

How can we work together to teach our children ?Letter sounds and recognition. Encourage the children to sound out sounds/letters that they know. Look at road signs, street names….Point to the first letter of an unfamiliar word. Allow your child to have thinking time, do not be tempted to jump in!

Sound progression

• 42 main sounds• Some sounds are written with two letters, such as ee and or.

These are called Diagraphs.• The letters are not introduced in alphabetical order, the first

group, S, A, T, I, P, N have been chosen because they make many 3 letter words.

• Blending is the process of saying individual sounds in a word and running them together to make a word.

• D-O-G makes dog.• Some sounds, diagraphs, are represented by 2 letters, such as

sh. They should sound out the sh not the individual letters. Same for r-ai-n and f-ee-t, this takes practice !

How can you help?

• Finding the right time for you

• Practising regularly

• Enjoying it

Pause

• Give your child some ‘thinking time’ during this time your child may look at the pictures on the page, re-read the sentence so far, and make attempts at the new word.

• Try to Pause and Praise.

Prompt

• If you have Paused then you may need to Prompt,

• “Try that bit again and think what would make sense/sound right..?”

• “What is in the picture, what would make sense that begins with the ‘b’ sound ?”

• Prompt, they went to the shops and ….• Or you could tell your child the word and

let him/her continue.

PRAISEWe all feel good when someone tells us how well we have done something, especially if we are

learning a new skill.Praise your child for every attempt

at self-correction.Try giving specific praise,“I like the way you ……”

When do we start?

• Children start taking books home after half term• These are sharing books, an opportunity to read

for enjoyment, for you to read to them• When your child has developed a strong

phonological awareness they will be introduced to our banded books

• We send home banded reading books when the children are ready, not when they are a specific age

Reading Progression

• Children bring home reading books which are book banded Band 1 to 10 then onto Paperbacks when each individual child is ready.

• We then explore the text by looking at the characters, the plot, the setting, what is inferred, what can we deduct and what is our overall understanding of the text.

Conclude and Celebrate

When you have finished a text allow some time to discuss the text.

How was it for you?

Questions

?