Welcome to the Reception Reading Meeting

The reading journey... What has happened so far? Small babies find pleasure in language They enjoy being sung and read to They like it when adults tell them stories and rhymes Through talking and listening they are discovering how language works Through watching other family members read they observe and imitate They have been surrounded by print in their environment

The reading journey continues... School builds on the experiences of literacy that children bring with them from home and pre-school. The journey continues and our school aims to not only teach children to read words on a page, but also help them to become readers who choose to read on their own. Research shows that children will stand a better chance of doing well in school if they already enjoy reading and being read to, and are used to talking about books.

Teaching reading is a partnership between Home and School How can you help at home? What do we do at school? Teach the letter sounds/phonemes using a synthetic phonics approach (RML) Teach children to blend the sounds/phonemes together to form words Teach children to recognise the high frequency words on sight. Teach the children how to handle, value and respect books. Inspire children to love reading and enjoy sharing stories. Ensure children experience a range of fiction and non-fiction books through group reading and whole class reading sessions. Follow-up the sounds we teach. Play games (little and often) blending sounds together. Play games (little and often) blending sounds together. Play games with the word lists (eg flashcards, stick words around the house) Model to your child how special books are and how to look after them. Read to your child regularly, sharing your favourite stories and the CAPER books. Visit the local libraries. Encourage researching an interest (trains, space, horses etc)

What is C.A.P.E.R? C hildren A nd P arents E njoy R eading Your child will be encouraged to change their C.A.P.E.R. book after you they have shared it with them. Ideally they should change their book 3 times a week. R eading

How to enjoy C.A.P.E.R. books Always choose a convenient time, 5 or 10 minutes may be long enough. Make sure your child wants to share a story and stop if they become bored or uninterested. It should be an enjoyable experience for both of you. Give lots of praise for good listening and any comments they make. Parents have been to see me in the past and said that their child is refusing to read. Sometimes they are tired and may need a break after finishing school just to wind down. This is not uncommon.

What comments should I put in the C.A.P.E.R. diary? Your comments are helpful for the teacher to see how your child feels about reading. We suggest a minimum of three comments a week, it does not have to be every time you read together. You could comment about your child’s enjoyment of the book was your child happy to share the book? any opinion your child had on the story or character/s the genre of books your child is selecting/enjoying

An example of a group reader

What are group readers? The group reader is sent home in a named plastic bag for you to share together. Your child may not be able to read every word in the group reader, but they will begin to recognise certain repeated words and phrases and sound out others. When sharing the group reader, encourage retelling; joining in with repeated sections; using the pictures as clues for the words; predictions and questions or opinions about the story. Your child will take part in Focus Time once a week when they will read with a teacher. Focus Time is done in a small group with a set of ‘group readers. Our group readers are a selection of quality books with repetitive text; high frequency words and interesting stories to discuss

This is how we teach reading: Phonics Phase 1 - Rhyming and sound talking Phase 2 - Initial sounds VC and CVC words, segmenting and blending (some digraphs) Phase 3 - Grapheme correspondence and blending to read simple captions. Phase 4 – Blend and segment words with adjacent consonants (e.g. stand, frog, jumps) Phase 5 – More graphemes for phonemes, alternative pronunciations break read as breek. Or cow as coe (snow). Phase 6 – Word specific spellings and increasingly fluent sounding and blending of new words. We teach children how to listen for sounds in the environment and rhyme. Phase 1 Then we start teaching them the individual letter sounds very quickly. We also start demonstrating how to segment and blend CVC words and spell simple words. We have reading time and writing time. We want children to be really confident sound talkers- demonstrate. By Phase 5 they will have learnt 40+ graphemes for the phonemes taught in phases two and three and they will be learning about alternative pronunciations. We aim for them to reach phase five by the end of Year 1. At this time there is a phonics screening test you will be informed about this in more detail next year.

What is RML? masdtinpgockubfelh https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=rml+phonics+set+1+pure+sounds&&view=detail&mid=6211629D042ADB3F63846211629D042ADB3F6384&FORM=VRDGAR Ruth Miskin Literacy- Read Write Inc. With the RML approach the children are initially taught 31 sounds, not just the alphabet. The sounds are taught in a specific order, to allow the children to word build. masdtinpgockubfelh We use this scheme in FS to teach the phonemes and this is done a quite a speed a new sound a day at first. Now what will happen is as you can appreciate children start at different developmental stages and may not be ready to proceed or need to repeat some of the programme again to reinforce, so we teach phonics in EY and FS in grups according to the children’s phase. Each sound has a story and an action. The actions are connected to the sound and the shape of the letter, For example: m Maisie climbs mountains. Weave hand in an m shape, like a mountain, and say mmmm. This is a long sound. The letter a is what is known as a bouncy sound. The sound bounces around the shape of the letter a. Show a digraph; this is a digraph it is two letters graphemes which represent a phoneme.

What are the high frequency words? There are 210 high frequency words, also know as key words. These are the words that the National Literacy Strategy recommends your child should be able to read by the time they leave Y2. These are the first 45.

What are the word lists? It is overwhelming to focus on all 45 words at once. The words are split into words lists, which are sent home to practise. Children in reception do not all start the word lists at the same time this is judged by the teacher. Do not worry if it is Christmas time and your child does not have a list they may not be at a stage where they are segmenting and blending to read.

What about the ‘tricky’ words? Many of the high frequency words can be learnt by sounding out e.g. o-n on Some of the high frequency words cannot be sounded out in this way, e.g. was and are. These words have to be learnt by sight. It helps some children to see the overall shape of the word. We need to help children make connections between these isolated words and words in the text.

Most importantly, reading should be fun ! Our goal is to generate a life-long love of reading and storytelling in your child.