Thank you to the parents and children that joined us this week for Mrs Fisher’s Reading Workshop. This was an opportunity to find out more about our continued plans for developing reading outcomes for all pupils and our initiative for Reading for Pleasure. Mrs Fisher has successfully led English at Upwell for over 6 years with huge advances in improving our Reading Curriculum offer.
With all staff highly trained in our synthetic phonics program – Read Writ Inc, and great outcomes in Word Reading, and the Governments statutory guidance for reading coming in, our focus is to further develop Language Comprehension to ensure Skilled Reading. Mrs Marsters reiterated this being the biggest barrier to meeting age related expectations at Year 6 and being prepared for the Key Stage 3 curriculum across all subjects, e.g. maths, history, etc they all require highly skilled readers.
Parents asked for advice on how you can continue to support at home.
Mrs Fisher made the following suggestions:
Your child will come home with a book that they can read and self-selected books from our library. To develop Skilled Readers, you could:
- Improve vocabulary skills by ensuring they have a secure understanding of what words mean. Often, words can have more than one meaning.
- Book talk: our phonics scheme books have questions at the back to support parents in developing children’s background knowledge of what they have read. Use these and come up with some of your own.
- Reading aloud and discussing a book or story can help children improve their verbal reasoning skills. Discussion and guidance can help children practice deep comprehension skills.
- Introduce games like - Speed read – time how quickly they can read the book with clarity and fluency
Although we are not continuing to provide reading records in Y2 and KS2, if this works for you, keep a log and upload evidence onto your Dojo Portfolios.
- Upload photos and progress for reading for pleasure.
- Visit the School reading cloud and leave a book review. Reserve books and see what other pupils are reading.
- Contact Ms Roberts, the academy librarian, for advice and support for children taking books out of the Academy library: library@upa.eastern-mat.co.uk
- Visit our website Reading Pages for more great resources, virtual books, advice and support.
Thank you for your continued support. A second workshop, for those unable to attend, is planned for early next half-term and the PowerPoint will be available on our website next week.