This guide is to help you understand how we teach literacy at Belgrove Infant Girls’ School and the part that you can play in helping your child become a confident and fluent reader.
Our aim is for all our children to become independent, lifelong readers, able to read a wide range of texts for a variety of purposes with understanding and for pleasure.
We welcome and encourage support from home in the teaching of phonics and reading. We hope that the information on this page will be of help in this partnership between home and school.
Before we can teach our children to read, it is important to first build the foundation for lifelong learning and reading success. Here are 5 Pre-Reading Skills Kids Need To Be Successful Readers:
In order to learn, children need to be ready and have the motivation to read.
What Can Children Do?
Show an interest in books and reading
Ask you to read aloud
Pretend to read
What Can Parents Do?
Let your child pick what book she wants to read
Read to your child everyday
Read with enthusiasm
Children need to have language skills before learning how to read so they can describe things and share their knowledge and ideas.
What Can Children Do?
Answer simple questions about a story
Retell a story in their words
Describe elements in a story such as the characters and setting
What Can Parents Do?
Ask your child open-ended questions like “what do you think will happen next?”
Have your child retell the story using puppets
Encourage your child to make up her own story
In order to learn how to read, children must understand how books work or concepts of print.
What Can Children Do?
Hold a book correctly
Turn pages in the right direction
Read from left to right and top to bottom
Understand words represent a spoken word and convey a message
What Can Parents Do?
Use your finger to track the words
Point to the parts of a book such as the front cover, title, and author
Point out punctuation marks- Full Stop, Question Mark, Exclamation Mark, Speech Marks, Comma
Let your child hold the book, turn the pages, and point to the words as you read
Letter knowledge is understanding that the letters of the alphabet have different names and sounds.
What Can Children Do?
Name the letters of the alphabet
Recognize lowercase and capital letters
Name each letter’s sound
What Can Parents Do?
Teach your child the letters in her name
Read Alphabet books
Ask your child to identify letters on things in the grocery store or on signs around town
Phonological Awareness is a foundational reading skill that allows a child to break words into smaller components, identify rhyming pairs and blend and segment words. Phonological awareness activities focus on listening and orally reproducing sounds, words and word components and does not involve looking at written sounds and words.
What Can Children Do?
Listen for rhyming words in songs, stories and poems.
Count the syllables in a word
Blend sounds together orally
Orally segment or break words down into individual sounds
Substitute one letter sound for another one to make a new word
What Can Parents Do?
Sing songs and rhymes
Play word games
Reading rhyming books