Welcome to Denby Free

Primary School
New Parents Reading
Information
Sparrow Class 2020
What is included?
• What is phonics?
• The key skills
– Speaking and listening
– Decoding
– Comprehension
• The reading scheme
• Instilling a love of reading
Learning to Read
• Children love reading! Our aim is to nurture this in
school and at home. Reading should always be
fun!
• ALL CHILDREN LEARN TO READ AT THEIR OWN
PACE!!!
• It’s takes a lot of practise to learn. What matters is
that they get there in the end.
• The aim of this information is to give you the tools
to help your child learn to read and love reading.
 What’s Phonics???
Simply a method of learning to read and write
using the sounds in words.
Pure sounds not sounds with an 'uh‘
Watch the above and another good resource is the Phonics
Audio Guide on Oxford Owl:
https://cdn.oxfordowl.co.uk/2016/05/05/20/22/32/561/20097
_content/index.html?id=ae
Each day we’ll have a 20 minutes phonics session. To
practise listening skills, reading and writing. A great support
with understanding how we teach phonics is on Oxford Owl
https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/learn-to-read-phonics/
Schools teach reading through learning three key
skills. All are equally important!

Speaking and Listening skills:

Decoding: Reading the words (by sight or

blending).

Comprehension: Understanding the words

and story.
Speaking and Listening
These are skills that we learn from birth through to
adulthood. It’s the ability to hear, process and
discriminate between sounds. For instance
recognising that the word cat starts with a ‘c’ and
ends with a ‘t’. Or hearing the noises of farm
animals and saying “That’s the noise a cow makes.”
Things you can do:
Clapping – can they hear your pattern and copy it?
Accentuate the initial sound in names and words –
“Can you see the d-og?”
Decoding
Simply using the sounds we learnt in the clip to read
words.
Some technical phonics jargon!
Phoneme or sounds: Words are made up of phonemes
(sounds) The smallest unit of sound in words.
So the word chip is made up of three sounds.

tip
The baby alphabet (abc) are the sounds
The ABC’s are the letter names
Decoding
Some more technical jargon!

Grapheme: The written representation of a sound.

Digraph and Trigraph: Two or three letters representing

one sound. E.g. ch and igh.
Decoding
Blending: Children learn to READ SOME WORDS by
firstly learning to hear and recognise in print the
individual sounds. Once they can do this they learn
to blend (squash) these sounds together to make
the word. So “c-a-t” becomes “cat”. You can robot
talk, squash it or bounce a ball for each sound. This
physical movement helps children blend. With time
they memorise these words by sight and no longer
have to blend.
Phonics for writing and
spelling
Segmenting: Blending is squashing sounds they
SEE in print together to make a word and
segmenting is pulling a word they HEAR apart so
they can identify the individual sounds.
They can then write these sounds, spelling out a
word.
Phonics for writing and
spelling
English is a funny old language. For instance tricky
words are ones that are very difficult to sound out.
For example ‘the’ and ‘said’. They memorise these
by sight. The children will work through sets of
keywords that progress with the books they can
read. The children will need to be able to read these
words by sight before moving to the next set.
Some sounds can be written in different ways. e.g.
‘ai’ or ‘ay’. If they misspell just gently correct and say
this is how this word is spelt.
Phonics for writing and
spelling
When you talk, model breaking words into
sounds. For example you could say
“Can you see the sh-i-p?”
“Would you like some m-i-l-k?”
Comprehension:
• This is the understanding of texts and is as
vital as decoding (reading the words). Without
comprehension the text has no meaning.
• Ask questions when reading. The first books
your children get will have question cards with
them if you want support with this.
• Use the pictures as cues to help understand
the words and the story.
The Reading Scheme
• Your child starts on pre-reader books with no words. This
helps them hold a book, turn pages and learn
comprehension. They then have banded books with words
and a set of keywords.
• From Band 2 your child will have two books to take home
– a reading book mostly Oxford Reading Tree (Biff and
Chip) and a choosing/sharing book which is for you to read
and share with them.
• The books are changed once or twice a week, after they
have read it in school and at home. Our aim is to hear your
child read twice a week in school.
3 steps to reading a book:
1. Read the book to your child pointing out the
words. Talk together about the story, pictures
and ask questions.
2. Read the words together to help your child.
Point to the words as you read. Continue talking
about the story, pictures and asking questions.
3. Let your child read the words. Continue to talk
about the book to develop comprehension.
Keywords:
These are words which correspond to your
child’s reading books. Have fun learning these!
They start with the character pictures.

These are words which appear regularly in their

books. Some will be ‘Tricky Words’ which are
words you can’t sound out like ‘the’ or ‘was’. The
purpose of the keywords is to help them
memorise words by sight.
Sound cards:
Each time we learn a new sound in phonics
we will send that sound card home. This also shows
how to form the letter. You will usually get two of
these sound cards each week. Flick through these
when you read at home.

Phoneme frame game:

We send out the sounds we have learnt each week
(we begin learning the sounds at phase 2 and move
onto phase 3 later in Reception). You can place the
sound cards in each square to make words by
blending them together.
Letter formation is taught alongside the letter
sounds and the rhymes to support this are
recorded on the sound cards.
“But I don’t wanna read!”
You know your child best. So find out what
motivates them to read.

5 minutes a night is plenty. Continue reading lots

of bedtime stories as being a good reading role
model and giving them language helps them with
their reading development. Most importantly
though its lots of fun!