Reading at home:

Evidence strongly suggests that parents and the home environment are essential to the early teaching of reading and fostering a love of reading.  We, therefore, encourage good reading habits inside and outside of school.

SUPPORTING READING AT HOME:

We encourage parents/carers to hear their children read regularly - at least four times a week, for 15 – 30 mins per day (dependent on the age of the child).  Regular reading is better than longer sessions once a week. 

For younger pupils, who are still using phonics to ‘sound out’ words, parents should help them to sound out the letters in words and then to ‘’blend’ the sounds together to make a whole word.  

Even when children have developed fluency in reading, it is still important for adults to hear them read aloud regularly.  Children are continuing to develop their understanding of texts at this stage.  When reading with a child, adults should stop and ask questions to encourage children to talk about the book they are reading.  Adults should also encourage discussions about any unknown words to help develop the child’s range of vocabulary.

OUR BOOK SCHEMES ACROSS THE SCHOOL:

Access to reading materials at the correct level is vital in setting children up to succeed in reading.  Carefully matched reading books are sent home for children to read independently or read to someone else.  Pupils should be able to read their texts with fluency and confidence – like a storyteller.  We do not send texts home the children cannot read because we always want them to be set up to succeed in their reading.  We want children to enjoy reading - to someone else or to themselves.

READ WRITE INC PHONICS BOOK BAG SCHEME

Children begin their reading journey through learning phonics in the Read Write Inc. programme.  Children working on the Read Write Inc. programme take home a Read Write Inc. Ditty Sheet / ‘book bag book’, which are fully decodable and matched directly to children’s current phonics level.  The book bag books include many of the same reading activities that we use in class and include parent guidance. 

Pupils should be able to share the Ditty Sheet/ book bag book confidently and fluently, reading with some expression or a ‘storyteller voice’ – as they will have read the book in school (sometimes, several times) before taking it home for extra practice.  Parents/carers are assured that the ease in which pupils can read their Ditty Sheets/book bag books does not mean that these are ‘too easy’ – we want children to feel confident and look forward to sharing their reading with someone at home.  Children enjoy re-reading stories they know well. Their speed, fluency and understanding improve on every read. 

We make sure that pupils can read, with fluency, the full scheme of Read Write Inc. Phonics story books before they progress onto our school Book Band scheme.

BOOK BAND SCHEME

When children have completed the Read Write Inc. phonics programme, children will take home Book Band books, which are in line with their current level of reading skill.  Our structured 'book band' library is made up of a variety of published schemes including, Oxford Reading Tree, Collins Big Cat, Barrington Stoke books, amongst others.  These books are designed to build children's fluency at an age-appropriate level, and broaden their reading experience which will stretch their reading comprehension.

We recommend that children, who are taking books from the Book Band Scheme, read at home for at least 20 minutes a night.  Even when children can read to themselves, they still love to read aloud to another person – this also enables them to practise tone and expression when reading.

Monitoring of reading diaries is carried out by teachers to check for regular reading and to give praise and class incentives in order to promote the uptake with home reading and pupil/parental engagement.