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. 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 Summer 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 school’s chosen phonics scheme supports parents in enabling them to provide children with effective learning at home. 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.