We love books!

Throughout your child's first year at school, they will have plenty of opportunities to share books in school and at home. 
To begin with, your child will bring home a picture book from our Reading Scheme to share with you. Please talk through the story, looking at the Characters and make predictions about the story line. When your child is ready,The next stage in the reading scheme introduces books with decodable words.  To decode and read the words in the books, we will be teaching the children the process of blending; this is a process of saying the sounds in a word and then running them together to make the word: c-a-t. It would be beneficial to use this process at home whilst reading as well. Some of the books also use repetition of high frequency words that the children will sight read. We ask you to carry out the same reading routine as mentioned above with these books and encourage them to remember words that they have seen before. to read to you at home. Reading should never be a chore - please enjoy it with your child!!

Reading helps build self-confidence, it opens up a whole new world of understanding and it helps children make more sense of the world around them. It is great for children to experience a variety of reading materials eg. picture books, hard backs, comics, magazines, poems, and information books.

Your child will also bring a 'Sharing' book from the class library and a sharing book from the Wiltshire Library van. Please enjoy these books with your child and return them in Book Bags.

The Library Van comes to school every other Thursday so please keep these books safe!  

We use Little Wandle to teach phonics.This will involve learning to read and write 4 sounds a week. In phonics the main sounds of English are taught, not just the alphabet sound. Each sound has an action so encourage your child to share this with you. As the letter sounds are taught, they are stuck into a Sound Book that will be brought home. If possible go through the Sound Book with your child regularly-practising the sounds and the actions. They can also colour and fill in the letter formation sheet when they tell you about the new sounds they have learnt. The first cluster of sounds which are ‘s,a,t,p,i,n’ these are taught first because they make more simple words than any other six letters.

It is important that all of these come into school with your child every day as we will be reading with them, going through their letter sound book and word tins with them too on a daily basis.

Help your child practise their phonics - https://www.youtube.com/user/breakthruchris 

(Mr Thorne does phonics with Geraldine the giraffe) 

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/ 

or visit youtube.com and search 'Articulation of phonemes'