Reception Parents’ Reading Meeting

February 2019

Thank you for coming!

• Your role in your child’s development as a reader is vital, and we really value the partnership with you.

• HMCI Report Reading for Purpose & Pleasure: ‘Effective schools see parents’ involvement as fundamental to raising standards.’

Creating Readers• We want children to become confident and effective readers, and this

process starts from when they are babies.

Talk, talk, talk! (And listen!)

• All of the activities you do, and the things you talk about, with your children build up their experience and understanding of the world. This helps build their vocabulary, and supports their later enjoyment and comprehension of stories.

Bedtime story• One of the most valuable things you can do to help your child develop

a love of books and reading is to read them a bedtime story.

• This helps create a routine at bedtime, and is a lovely way for your child to build up a store of known stories and start to develop favourites. There will be some books you share again and again…and again!

Teaching without realising

Sharing books with your child at home lets him or her absorb key principles of reading, like how to hold a book, and the directionality of print in English.

Visit the library • Books are expensive, but your child can join the library.

• You will find a wide range of books for your child to choose from –traditional tales; books by a favourite author; pop up and lift the flap books; dual language texts.

• Some children might prefer information books – just tap into their interests. We often find mini experts in Reception on a range of topics – dinosaurs, trains, animals, maps.

• Don’t forget rhymes and poems!

• See if there are Rhyme Time or story sessions you can take younger children to.

Let your child see you reading

• Let your child see that reading is important in your life – think of when you read at home:

Learning to read independently• Children will remember bits of stories – eg repeated refrains (Run, run

as fast as you can…) – and anticipate remembered rhymes.

• They will want to talk and ask questions about what they can see in the pictures.

• They will want to hear familiar favourites repeatedly.

All of these things help support their gradual move towards reading independently.

Decoding• In Reception the children will become more adept at decoding for

themselves.

• They will use a combination of phonics and growing sight word recognition to work out the ‘code’ of the writing on the page.

• They become increasingly aware of the connection between the squiggles that are writing and the meaning it conveys.

Phonics• Initially children need to be able to distinguish environmental sounds,

before moving on to work on specific phonemes.

• There are around 44 phonemes that children are expected to know.

• A phoneme is a unit of sound uttered in speech (as opposed to a sound like a kettle boiling).

• The children will learn phonics through games which encourage speaking and listening, and move on to learning the correspondence between phonemes and their written form, called graphemes.

Why is English spelling as it is?

English is a rich mixture of languages.

Spoken English came from Germanic languages brought by the Anglo-Saxons, mixed with other languages like Norse from the Vikings and French from the Normans.

The 40 or so sounds used in spoken English words were then written using an alphabet brought by Latin-speaking Romans, which only has 26 letters.

So in English one sound does not always match one letter.

Also sometimes the same sound may be written in more than one way in English, because words came from different languages. For instance the word ‘fern’ comes from the Anglo-Saxons and the first sound is spelt ‘f’. Whereas the word ‘phone’ comes from Greek and the same sound is spelt ‘ph’.

Segmentation and BlendingChildren will be taught to hear, identify, segment and blend phonemes in words.

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If children are struggling with blending a word better to tell them the word than let them struggle, but what is important is that you encourage them to go back and map the sounds on to the word –model blending ‘smooth reading’.

Sight, or common exception words

There is no point sounding out words like the or said.

Some words do not lend themselves to regular blending or segmenting and in some cases children need to recognise the words by sight to ensure ‘smooth reading.’

You can help by supporting your child to recognise these words a few at a time.

Hearing your child read their bookBe positive!

Allow enough time for it so you don’t feel rushed.

Enjoy it!

Take turns to read, and talk about the book.

Always remember that a good 5 or 10 minutes is better than a difficult half an hour…

Speak to your child’s teacher if

you have any concerns or questions.

How else to support

Please write when you have read with your child in their home school reading record.

If you are able to, you are always very welcome to come in to parent reading afternoons or mornings.

Further information• If you would like further information, a good place to look is on the

Oxford Owl website, in the parent section.

• To hear correct articulation of phonemes – google this and watch this short clip on Youtube. It is important to say the phonemes correctly as this aids blending for reading. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqhXUW_v-1s