We want all the children at Tollgate Primary School to have a love of reading, therefore the most important role you can play is to share books with your child and ensure they have access to books. We recommend visiting the town library to access a wide variety of books.

In Early Years, talking about the stories and asking the children what they think might happen is a great way to start developing a child’s comprehension of a text. Children can then move on to thinking about the meaning of new words using the pictures and context to help them. When children are able to read for themselves, ask them to tell you about their book.

You can support your child at home by listening to them read their school reading book. Doing this regularly will have a positive impact on their reading progress. We encourage you to take 5 minutes for 5 days a week to listen to your child read. Don’t worry if they do not finish their book in this time.

When children first learn to read, they will need to break each word down into the separate phonemes (letter sounds) and then blend them together. This will take time. If they make a mistake then encourage them to have another attempt at blending. You can support by sounding the word out for them and letting them blend. As they develop their phonic knowledge and sight vocabulary, the children are ready to develop their reading fluency.

To help develop reading fluency, the children can read the same page repeatedly until they can read it without sounding out any words. Once they can do this, move onto the next page. Encourage the child to then read the two pages without sounding any of the words out. Once fluency has been developed, children will gain a much better understanding of what they have read.

If you have any questions about how to support your child at home, please speak to the class teacher.