Children will experience the most success in reading when school and home work together. Children learn about the importance of reading as they watch family members use reading and writing for everyday purposes. Reading for pleasure, sharing stories at home or using a recipe shows them that reading is a useful skill. Research shows the importance of reading on a daily basis in developing children’s use and understanding of vocabulary and reading at home will enable them to practise and solidify their skills learnt at school. At Our Lady and St Rose we therefore aim to create a strong link with parents in order to facilitate and support their reading journey at home.

Decodable Reading Books- Sent Home Weekly

It is crucial to allow children the opportunity to practise their blending skills and to consolidate their knowledge learnt in each phonics session. Alongside our phonics teaching, we therefore use the Bug Club Phonics decodable reading books that have been written specifically to match the order in which grapheme-phoneme correspondences are introduced in class. These books are fully decodable, which means that every word in the book can be read using just the children’s developing phonics knowledge.

In Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 children are sent home with two reading books per week, one for practising current sounds and one for revising previous sounds and to aid fluency. We ensure that the children's decodable books only contain sounds and words that have been taught to them, within our scheme. Not only does this allow children to embed and secure their phonics knowledge, but it also allows them to experience success and reading fluency. This in turn builds their confidence, motivation and enthusiasm for reading. 

Reading for Pleasure Books- Sent Home Weekly

At our school we believe it is integral for our children to develop a life long love of Reading and to feel passionate about books and different literature. Even though Phonics is essential, we believe that our pupils should also have opportunities to access and read other books at home, based on their passions, interests, likes and dislikes. Our children choose and are sent home with a reading for pleasure book which they then change weekly. These books may be above the children's reading level, but we inform our parents that these books are to be read, shared and enjoyed together at home, and are different to the phonetically decodable books.

Bug Club Online Resources

Our school’s chosen phonics scheme supports parents in enabling them to provide children with effective learning at home. Our children from Reception- Year 2 are given Active Learn logins so that they can access the Bug Club resources, to support them with consolidating their knowledge learning in school. Available for parents and carers to access are: are instructional videos with demonstration lessons and how to pronounce the pure sounds, games and activities and online specific decodable e-books.  We assign new e-books to children in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 regularly as well as encouraging them to re-read online books also. We know that repetitive reading strengthens children’s understanding of the text and allows them to develop a deeper understanding of phonemic awareness. This will allow their  reading process becomes more enjoyable and help them succeed in Reading. 

Additional Parental Involvement

As children begin the structured phonics programme in Foundation Stage, parents are invited to a Reading and Phonics workshop to explain how their children will be taught to read and how to support them at home. This workshop is also repeated twice in Year 1 ( at the beginning of the year and in the Spring Term ) in order to outline the next progression steps in their child’s phonics journey and also explain the year 1 Phonics Screening Check.

Our website is a useful tool for our parents in finding out more about Phonics in our school, accessing the stage of learning for their child and for downloading and viewing supportive parent resources. As an example, our website includes videos which support them and their child with saying sounds, action for sound videos which we use in school, Bug Club Guides for Parents and information about what Phonics is and how the scheme is used in our school.

Home Phonics Packs are also sent out half termly to all Reception and Year 1 children to help assist Reading and learning Phonics at home.