Reading

Why read at home?

"Parents make the greatest difference to achievement through supporting their child's learning in their home rather than supporting activities in school."

(National Literacy Trust)

Regular reading at home leads to a child improving as a reader faster. However, we appreciate the challenge of juggling family life with home learning! We hope the following information, ideas and links will make it easier.

When to read?

Family life can be frantic and the list of jobs to be done can seem never ending! Often reading with your child is one job that gets pushed aside. But do not despair; reading can be done anytime, anywhere. Below are some ways, you can squeeze in some reading time:

• siblings reading to each other- can they read a younger sibling's bedtime story?
• your child can read to anyone- aunt, uncle, friend, neighbour, another pupil etc
• you can read the road signs to each other, posters or adverts displayed on shop windows
• Use sub-titles on the TV and turn the sound off (although you may not be very popular!)
• your child can read the shopping list to you as you shop
• your child can read the school letters to you that are sent home
• can they read the note you've left them on the fridge?

How do I help my child to read?

• Read with them little and often
• Model a good reader- read newspapers, bedtimes stories, visit the library. ENJOY READING!
• Prompt children on a range of skills they can use to understand the text: looking for any picture clues, sounding out any unknown words, reading around the sentence to try and find the meaning of a word, predicting what they think will happen
• Allow them to read books or comics they are interested in
• Play some reading games with the children

Research shows that regular reading at home leads to a child making accelerated progress in reading; to promote this, we encourage children to participate in our home reading using their reading scrapbook.

How does school help your child to read?

At Woodhouse West Primary School we use a structured reading scheme. The children use phonetically decodable books which are targeted to the phonics phase they are working at from EYFS until they become a fluent, confident reader and move on to colour banded books. This is when they select books to read at their level with guidance from their teacher. Reading lessons take place daily, where the children focus on comprehension skills and discussing the texts.

Over the week the children engage with a variety of experiences to increase and develop their fluency and comprehension skills. The sessions are made up of comprehension sessions and a reading for pleasure session. Throughout the sessions children have the opportunity to read as a group or independently. During the comprehension sessions children are exposed to a range of poems, fiction and non-fiction extracts to develop a range of reading strategies in response to a variety of questions linked around the key skills of prediction, inference, retrieval, sequencing, summarising or vocabulary. The reading for pleasure session fosters and promotes a love and enthusiasm for reading such as time at the local library, paired reading sessions and reading in our immersive reading room.

What makes a good reader?

When we asked the children this question we were met with a variety of answers ranging from having the ability to sound out words to being able to read aloud clearly. At Woodhouse West, we want all our children to be fluent, accurate, have a sound understanding so they can learn from what they read but also enjoy reading.

What should my child read?

At the bottom of the page are links to recommended books that are age appropriate for your child to enjoy independently or as a family.

As a school we are encouraging children from Nursery to Year 6 to try to read as many books on the given list as possible throughout each year of their school life.

Reading areas in classroom have a selection of books from the appropriate list for children to enjoy a specified times throughout the school day. 

Take a look at the list with your child to see how many they have already read and complete activities within their reading scrapbook.

Our Reading Champions are a group of pupils that aim to promote a love of reading across the school. We will meet together regularly to discuss books and reading, sharing our favourite books, exploring different genres of books and authors as well as promoting reading within their classes and across the school.

We are hoping for the children to be involved with the promotion and running of future book fairs (COVID restrictions allowing)- making posters and helping to run the fairs by helping parents and children to find particular books. 

Initially we are looking for Reading Champions from Y4-Y6.

If you would like to become a Reading Champion, please complete the following application task and hand it in to Mrs Christon in the headteacher's office.

Task:

1) Choose your favourite book.

2) Create an A4 or A3 scrapbook style poster which is book review or recommendation which will persuade others to try the book.

Needs to include:

• Name of book & author
• Front Cover either a printed or drawn
• Description of plot (brief- don't give any spoilers away)
• Images- printed or drawn
• Star rating