Help @ Home

supporting your child with SPELLINGS at home

In Key Stage 2, the children follow Pathways to Spell, through daily teaching of spelling objectives, which ensures that pupils become confident and competent spellers. At home, some of the spellings they made need to recap on are common exception words for years 1-6.

Year 12 statutory spellings.docx

Year 3 and 4 statutory spellings.docx

Additionally, if you would like to support your child further at home with spellings, there are a number of strategies and methods such as: dictionary dig, crosswords, word searches, word pyramids, matching pairs (for plurals), mnemonics and root word finder. Please see below for some ideas:

Vocabulary map home learning.pdf

Spelling Pathway.pdf

Supporting your child to read at home

Accelerated Reader

Children in Key Stage 2 at East Farleigh use the Accelerated Reader (A.R.) program to support their independence in selecting books that are appropriately pitched to promote fluency and comprehension skills at exactly the right level. This helps to secure the very best progress from each and every child, whilst still allowing plenty of choice and autonomy is being able to select books that appeal to their individual interests.

It has proved to be a very effective system for motivating children and ensuring good progress in reading. Children have access to a range of beautiful books in their class libraries; these are regularly replenished from our school library by nominated reading ambassadors.

It is vital that you and other family members continue to listen to your child read as they progress through the school. This not only helps support their fluency and comprehension, but it can also lead them develop a true love and enjoyment of reading as they will see first hand the pleasure you take in listening to them share their stories with you. It is important that you capture these moment by writing in your child's reading record book; this also gives us a useful measure to see how regularly children are reading.

Parent's Guide - Accelerated Reader 360 | RenaissanceParent's guide designed to answer common questions about Accelerated Reader. Explore questions around reading level, reading practice and quiz taking. A comprehensive look at how students use Accelerated Reader in the classroom.

The link above is jam-packed with questions and answers about Accelerated Reader.

If you have questions about reading or AR, please contact your child’s class teacher who will be happy to help.

Some Top Tips for promoting KS2 Reading @ Home

Use whatever you've got at home! Support your child in choosing books to read that you've got at home. Dig out books you may have lurking on a bookshelf somewhere. Where necessary, take it in turns to read from the books and spend lots of time chatting about what's been read. Challenge them to read things they may not normally choose.
Listen to Audio Books - There are so many audio books available for free. Listening to a story and then talking about it or answering questions about it is a really useful activity. Deep discussion and questioning around a text will really support comprehension skill development.
Amazon Kindle - You can sign up for a month long free trial and this gives access to lots of books.
Read to your child and talk, talk talk! Reading to your child has numerous benefits and is so important. It's essential to model good reading to children and it's also a lovely experience to share books with children. Don't underestimate the power of reading to your child and then talking in detail about what you've read. Click the button to the right to see our parent guides, which include good questions to ask children when reading.
Oxford Owl E-Books - Oxford Owl has a huge range of resources to support reading at home. Follow this link and select your child's age range for tips and free e-books. https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/
Work on Comprehension Skills - Use Read Theory as set by your teachers, or try BBC Bitesize to help your child work on comprehension skills. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zs44jxs
If you are not sure what to give your child next in terms of reading choices, this website has fantastic ideas of how to help your child branch out in their reading https://www.booksfortopics.com/branching-out .
Enjoy listening to or watching authors read stories online! https://www.youtube.com/user/puffinbooks1/videos
Enjoy Michael Rosen's stories and poems https://www.youtube.com/user/artificedesign/videos

Great Books Guide 2020Discover our favourite new children's books published over the last year across a wide range of ages and genres.

Year 3 and 4 Reading Support - Questions for Parents .pdf

Year 3 and 4 Reading Guide - Website.docx.pdf

Reading_with_TRUST_comic.pdf

7_top_tips_to_support_reading_at_home_–_for_Key_Stage_2.pdf

supporting your child to Write at home

Supporting handwriting at home

To help support the teaching of handwriting at home, we use the Letter-join handwriting programme. As part of our school subscription, you are able to access the Letter-join resources from home using the resources that your child will already be familiar with.

Writing longer passages of text, written speedily and neatly, are the aims for children in KS2. Letter-join has many practise handwriting worksheets that cover a selection of curriculum topics and are perfect for handwriting practise at home.

To build up handwriting speed and stamina, children can use the Dictation Exercises which will help with learning to write longer passages of text.