Our Home Reading program is set to kick off on Monday, October 26! We are excited here at school and are looking forward to your enthusiasm and support at home. Home reading has proven to help improve reading skills and participation in this program will help build your child’s confidence in his or herself as a reader.

How the Program Works:

This year, things will be different this year due to Health and Safety rules and regulations.

On Mondays, your child will bring home 2 books to enjoy reading with you. They may be read and reread over and over during that week and then returned on Friday. The books coming back will be put in quarantine for 7 days before going back into circulation. In order to manage this effectively, home reading books MUST be returned by Friday in order to get new books on Monday.

Please note that your child should be able to read these books independently or with little or no support, as the main purpose of Home Reading is to foster confidence, fluency and comprehension and a love of reading within your child.

At school, children take part in small group reading instruction, using books that provide new challenges and learning opportunities. As your child’s reading skills progress, the books brought home will continue to match his or her independent skills and reading level.

Along with Home Reading books from school, we encourage you to read books on a daily basis from your home, school library or public library. Research shows that reading to your child has many wonderful benefits, including fostering an interest in and motivation for reading. We encourage you to spend 15-20 minutes each night enjoying some quality reading time with your child, either reading to you or you reading to your child.

Please ensure that your child’s 2 books are returned to school each Friday. Please note that there is a replacement cost of $10.00 for any book that is lost or damaged.

These are words that we see often and that students need to be able to read and write quickly. Many of these words your child will have come across in their home reading. Some of these words cannot be sounded out and just memorized. We will be working through a handful of these words each week to store in our memory banks. At first some of these words will be easy, that's okay! We want to build on what we know first. As we work through these words, they will be added to our word wall in the classroom so students can refer to them as they are working at their desks.

Students are encouraged to practice reading and spelling these words at home on a regular basis so that they become automatic. Encourage your child to find these words in their home reading or other books when you're reading together. Encourage your child to spell these words correctly when they are writing at home. When your child is writing at school, I would expect that the word wall words would be spelled correctly. On Fridays, we will do a little "test" to see how well the students know these words.