Reading in Class
Story and storytelling through play is a huge part of Owl Class and that love for a good story, inspires children to read. Throughout the day there is lots of storytelling: acting stories, listening to stories, telling stories and READING stories.
- Every day, we have a whole class guided reading session where we gather together and ‘follow the pointy stick’ to read a big book or interactive book together. It’s a great chance to learn from each other and discuss the mechanics of reading. It’s one of our favourite times of the day.
- Children also have a reading session each week in a small group where we focus on comprehension skills. We predict missing words in sentences, we reorder words so sentences make sense and we talk about how to make sense of words when the sounds don’t follow the rules.
- Auntie Gwen visits us on Tuesday mornings for some one to one reading time. Have your book in on Tuesdays and you could be a lucky reader.
Reading at Home
Reading is an incredibly complex skill, especially when reading the English language. Children need lots of short, focussed reading sessions.
- Listen to your child as often as possible. Short, daily sessions are best but make reading work for your family routine.
- As well as reading books, ask your child to read signs when on daily travels, read labels on items
- a great tip is to put subtitles on when they are watching the tv – without knowing, they’ll start paying attention to the written words on screen and be reading without knowing they’re reading.
Home-School Partnership
The class work together to earn a reading treat – a ‘Secret Reader‘ who comes to read to them. Each week, children with comments from their grown ups in their journals, win a petal for our reading display and we watch our reading garden bloom. When the flowers are in full bloom, a ‘Secret Reader’ will visit the class.
The decodable books the children are reading lack story, character and wonderment as they have very limited vocabulary, but they serve to allow the children to see that they can read, and build their confidence as they practise decoding. It is really important that children continue to experience wonderful texts with rich language and that they see this sharing of stories as READING, so keep sharing language rich story books the children love too.