Reading

In Reception, your child will read with an adult in school at least once a week, therefore it is important that your child brings their book bag to school everyday with their reading book and their reading diary. We change reading books every Monday and each week your child will bring home 3 reading books along with a reading record book. Throughout the year they will also bring home common words to learn to read and spell. It is important to hear your child read their reading book at home as often as possible.

Tips for reading with your child:

• Sit somewhere quiet and comfortable;
• Look at the pictures and discuss what is happening in the story;
• Encourage your child to say the sounds first and then read the word;
• Point to the words as you read together;
• Practise reading the reading rocket words, these are words that can't be sounded out yet;
• Record in your child's reading record every time you hear them read.

It is important to read stories to your child as well as hearing them read. This will help to develop a love and enjoyment of books and reading for pleasure. Every weekend we send home a book from the classroom book corner for you to share with your child and read to them.

Phonics

At Trinity we believe that the teaching of phonics plays a key role in helping children learn to read, write and spell. We follow the Sounds-Write Phonics Scheme which is a high quality, systematic programme. We ensure pupils develop the skills and knowledge they need to become confident readers, being able to read for pleasure, undertake research and develop their comprehension skills. Sounds-Write Phonics also teaches children how to spell words and this helps them to become confident writers.

There are 4 key concepts that we teach to all the pupils, these are:

1. Letters are symbols (spellings) that represent sounds;
2. A sound may be spelled using one, two, three or four letters;
3. The same sounds can be spelled in more than one way;
4. Many spellings can represent more than one sound.

There are 3 key skills that we teach to all the pupils, these are:

1. Blending - the process of pushing together two or more sounds to build words;
2. Segmenting - the ability to pull apart the individual sounds in words;
3. Phoneme manipulation - the ability to insert sounds in to and delete sounds out of words necessary to test out alternatives for spellings that represent more than one sound.

Phonics is taught on a daily basis and children are encouraged to be actively involved in their learning.