READING/HANDWRITING EVENING RALEIGH FEDERATION

11TH JUNE 2015 6PM

READING AND HANDWRITING

1. Learning to read.

• The stages of reading.

• How we teach reading.

• How you can help.

• Questions.

2. Cursive ( joined ) handwriting.

• Reasons we teach cursive writing from reception.

• How you can help.

• Questions.

3. Phonic Check – year ones

• Some brief information on the year one phonic check.

HOW WE TEACH READING• Lots of reading opportunities during the school day – these include individual

reading, paired reading, guided reading and reading to an adult amongst others.

• We follow a structured letters and sounds programme that teaches children the alphabet and progresses through to the sounds each individual letters makes, to combinations of letters to blending and segmenting whole words.

• The more aware a child is of these phonemes the better a reader he will become.

• These sessions are delivered in year groups daily with extra sessions provided for those children who need it at alternative times of day as well.

• The reading books/schemes are for children to practice their reading skills. We are able to monitor their progress with these books as well as other resources we have in school. They are leveled depending on where they are in their reading journey.

In Drakes we have a number of different schemes that are leveled accordingly . At Otterton we primarily follow the ORT scheme.

LEARNING TO READ

• Children learn to read at different speeds and often in a variety of ways.

• Some children appear to learn simply by osmosis! They see and they read. Do not worry if this is not your child as this is the exception and not the norm!

• Do not compare your child with someone else’s child . This is always a slippery slope and never helpful. Your child may take longer to get started, but will improve quickly once he has the skills needed under his belt.

• Children learn in a systematic way of whole word recognition, alphabetic recognition and phoneme ( sound) awareness.

• Children benefit enormously from being read to. This not only develops the understanding of what the goal of reading is, but motivates the enjoyment of reading.

• At this early age, more than anything, read to your child! You don’t need a lot of books. Repetition is so valuable at this early stage.“Repetition is the mother of learning,

the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.” (Zig Ziglar)

THE STAGES OF READING1. Pre alphabetic stage. Children recognise and remember words a bit like

shapes – they may see the word “look” with a tall shape at the beginning and then at the end with two circles in the middle. At this stage children easily confuse similar looking words.

2.Children begin to recognise some letters and connect them to their sounds. They can memorise a words and recognise the word boundaries – usually the beginning and end letters. For example they might recognise “look”, but also confuse it with similar words – “like”.

3.Children know their alphabet and how they are represented by sounds. They can blend them together to form words.

4. Chunking – children are recognising patterns and similarities in words. They no longer need to sound out every letter. They are becoming rapid decoders and word readers.

Can you read this word?

Do you know what it means?

“Kwiat”

“KWIAT”

Does the picture help you to find out what the word means?

Pictures are key to children in the start of their reading journey.

The journey of Letters and Sounds - Facts and definitions26 letters and 44 sounds The difficulty is that the letters don’t always relate directly to the sounds. There is not a one to one correspondence so it is tricky for children to decode and learn to read.Sometimes we can have letters that make different sounds for example ch as in church, then ch as in machine, then ch as in Christmas.  

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound – it may be one or two or three letters.A grapheme is one written symbol e.g each letter, punctuation and numbers.A digraph is a combination of two graphemes, which result in a single phonemee.g The English word “shot” contains four graphemes ( “s”, “h”, “o”, and “t” ) but only three phonemes because “sh” is a digraph. You tube pronunciation of phonemes https://youtu.be/BqhXUW_v-1s

SOUND BUTTONS

In letters and sounds, we use sound buttons to help the children see which sounds are on their own and which blend together.

Eg - i n c o p ch o p

. . . . . - . .

SEGMENTING AND BLENDING

• Segmenting means sounding out each part of

the word.

• Blending means putting those sounds they

have sounded out together to say the word.

BEFORE READING

• Talk about the cover – read the title and blurb.

• Discuss what they think the story will be about.

• Talk about real life experiences for example if you have a story about the beach, discuss times you have visited one. This may encourage topic words and a more varied vocabulary.

DURING READING

• Encourage your child to use a finger to follow the text.

• Pause, and give them time to have a go.

• Prompt – do you know the first sound? Can you spot any phonemes (sounds) you know?

• Model blending a word and get them to copy you.

• Praise them when they get it right.

• Encourage the use of the picture to help topic words.

Lots of words we use are built up around other words. Ask children to look for a word that they may recognise within the word – for example – rabbit , thin , cat- During reading

WHAT IF THEY MAKE A MISTAKE WHEN READING?

‘ the boy went in to his house and sat down’.

If the child read the sentence above as

‘the boy went into his home and sat down’

Don't worry as this shows they are reading for meaning and making sense of the text.

• If they make a mistake that you feel you can correct without it stopping the flow of their reading, then gently ask them if what they read made sense. Go back over the word and help them self correct.

• Re – read the sentence for them and ask them if it sounds right.

• Keep the positive praise going.

AFTER READING

• Reading doesn't stop once the words on the page have been read. Talking about what was read is very important. This way you can see how much the child has understood.

• Starting points for questions –

Where did he go?

What sort of day did they have?

What is your favourite bit of the story?

What happened next? Why?

Could there have been a different ending?

• Children might want to re-read stories again and again. This is fine and it helps develop their confidence and independence as a reader.

CEW WORDS / KEY WORDS

CEW or Tricky words – these are words that can’t be sounded out and need to be learnt from sight: come, we, are, gone, could

Key words – these are the most common words that are frequently used in books:

I, in, is, it, the, and

HOW TO HELP POINTERSYou can help you child by encouraging them to:

1. Use the pictures as clues.

2. Listen to the words as they read them to see if they make sense

3. Look to see if the words looks similar to one they already know

4. imagine what is happening and create a picture in their head.

5. Ask questions that will help them if they don’t understand.

6. Know when they have made a mistake and go back to put it right.

7. Look at the sounds in the words, looking for those they know go together.

8. Blend the sounds together to “sound out” new words.

9. Cut words into syllables .

10. Pick a time when your child is not tired. Little and often is best.

11. Repetition is key. A child has to see a word up to 50 times before they may “know” it.

HANDWRITINGReasons for cursive handwriting from reception age.

• It has been shown that children who are taught to print first, then join during year 2 or 3 find it very difficult to get out of the habit of printing. Some never develop fluid and legible handwriting. Print becomes a habit quickly formed and hard to break.

• By the age of 8 most children will have formed pencil grips and other writing habits. We want these to be well taught and permanent. They need to be taught early and well to give the best chance of becoming a good writer.

• The problems that arise with print, e.g reversal of letters, words becoming a stream of letters are practically eliminated.

• Children’s spelling improves as they visulise words as patterns. The hand remembers these and children eventually become better spellers.

• Children need to read and recognise a variety of different prints. Everything they read is not going to be the same. If we introduce cursive early it does not become a problem for children later on. They become flexible in their interpretation of the written word.

HOW TO HELP

• Be familiar with our script.

• Every letter that is joined starts on the line.

• Practice strengthening exercises with children – e.g play dough, cutting, small movement play. All these strengthen the muscles needed for writing .

• Encourage the children to write freely. It they are joining great – if they are not then do not stress. You will begin to see signs when they are ready to do so.

• Do not correct print! Allow the children to make that transition when they are ready.

• Do not pressurise them to so.

• Do expect their writing to get messier before it gets neater!

• By the time they are nearing the end of year one you will see some impressive gains in their handwriting.

PHONIC CHECK – YEAR ONE• The phonic check is during the week of 15th June 2015

• The purpose of the Year 1 phonics check is to confirm whether individual pupils have learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard.

• Pupils, who have not reached this standard at the end of Year 1, will receive support from school to ensure they can improve their phonic decoding skills. Pupils will then retake the screening check at the end of Year 2.

• The check will take the form of a ten page booklet with four words on each page. The check will contain 40 words, which pupils read one-to-one with a teacher. Half the words will be real words and the other half will be non-words

• You will be informed of whether or not your child has met the required standard in July.

• bim • shom • choan • fape • quemp • shropt • jair

My name is

M e ck