Helping parents to support children with phonics and developing a love for reading

At West Felton our aim is for children to develop a keen love of books and reading.  This, coupled with a secure grasp of phonics and the mechanics of reading will help children to become fluent readers, supporting them to succeed in a wide range of areas in school and throughout life.  In order to help you, as parents, support children in learning to read please find below some useful videos which explain our phonics teaching approach and also top tips for sharing books with your children.

At the bottom of the page you will find just some of things we do in school to promote a love of reading amongst our children.

A short video showing you how to pronounce sounds clearly using ‘pure sounds’.

A short video showing you how to support children in learning to blend sounds to read.

A video giving you Ten Top Tips to support your child in learning phonics and learning to read.

A video explaining ‘What Phonics is’.  This explains how the English language can be broken down into individual sounds that children learn to recognise.

Did you know?

Sharing books with children on a regular basis can have a dramatic impact upon your child’s vocabulary.  This in turn is proven to have an impact upon how well children achieve throughout school and in later life.  By the age of 5 there can be over 1 million words difference in the number of words a child has heard between those children who share books with adults compared to those that do not.  Just 5 minutes a day can last a lifetime.

How we support children to develop a love of reading at West Felton

All staff in West Felton have a love of books themselves which they are keen to share with the children.  Staff understand the vital role that books and reading have in enabling children to become lifelong learners.

Here are just a few of the things we do to help children develop a love of books and reading:

• Dedicated daily story time in each class with the use of a wide range of high quality books.   Children see this as a special part of the day and talk enthusiastically about the stories they have heard and the authors that they enjoy, even from a very young age.
• Yearly participation in Shrewsbury BookFest in both KS1 and KS2.
• Regular Author visits, both in person and more recently virtually.
• Regular trips to the local library.
• Participation in the library summer reading challenges.
• Whole school + staff participation in World Book Day – costumes, book trails, Masked Readers, Book in a Jar competitions.
• Whole school reading initiative- rewarding children for sharing books and reading regularly.
• Well stocked class libraries from which children are encouraged to take books home to share with parents.
• A systematic phonics scheme coupled with a fully phonetically decodable reading scheme to allow children to succeed in reading from the very start.
• Phonics and Early reading workshops for parents.