Reading Meeting

1. Reading Meeting Class One Class Two Stories make you think and dream; books make you want to ask questions. Michael Morpurgo

2. Welcome Curriculum expectations. Enjoyment of reading.

3. Reading at home Do • Keep reading time relaxed, comfortable and pleasurable- this is the time for your children to show you how well they can read and to be storytellers. • Find a quiet space, with the television turned off. • Make it a special time together. Talk about books, covers, stories and written words around the house.

4. Reading at home Don’t • Correct too often or too quickly. • Make reading negative or pressured. • Get worried or frustrated with progress- children need plenty of practise.

5. We use a successful reading programme called ‘Read Write Inc’ that enables every child to become a confident and fluent reader. It is a comprehensive phonics programme covering comprehension, reading and writing skills. The children will learn: • The corresponding letters/letter groups for 44 sounds using simple picture prompts. • Learn to read using sound blending (Fred talk). • Read lively stories featuring words they have learnt to sound out.

6. Key Words • Phoneme-the sound a letter makes. • Grapheme- the way the letter is written. • Digraph- when two letters make one sound for example ch or sh. • Trigraph- when three letters make one sound. • Split-digraph- e.g. a-e as in same. • Fred talk/segmenting- splitting words into sounds. • Blending- pushing the sounds together to read a word. • Red words- words that cannot be sounded out, e.g. was. Please note that some words start off as red words and then move to green words as children learn more sounds. • High frequency words- most common words found in children’s literature.

7. Teaching your child phonics at home Do • Always use pure sounds. Here is a link to the ‘Read Write Inc’ sound pronunciation guide. http://www.ruthmiskin.com/en/resources/sound-pronunciation-guide • Make phonics fun and interesting, you could go outside and write some graphemes on the concrete with chalk! Ask your child to be the teacher and teach you the new sounds they have been taught. • Look for the initial sounds in words. Ask your children what sound they can hear at the start of a word e.g. mummy starts with a ‘m’. • Be careful of tricky sounds such as onion, it does start with ‘o’ but children will hear the sound ‘u’.

8. Teaching your child phonics at home Don’t • Focus on letter names (the alphabet). This may confuse children and take the focus away from pure sounds. • Push children to blend too quickly, this is a skill that will take plenty of practise. • Ask children to segment and blend red words such as: I, was, no, my, the, of, me, to, said, your, do.

9. Class Two • Reading books at school (book bands). • Guided reading. • Home school diaries. • SATS https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculum-assessments-2016-sample-materials • Grammar, punctuation and spelling.

10. To end with… Reading is all about enjoyment!