Reading News
Welcome back to Autumn Term! We hope that you had a superb summer break and found time to relax, rest and read!
A big welcome to all families who have joined us this September, including those in our new Reception classes.
We are pleased to announce that we will be holding an "Early Literacy" presentation for parents in Years R to 2, that explains more about our bespoke phonics scheme "Pip and Pap Phonics" and how it is used to teach reading and writing. This will be held on 19th September at 2.30pm.
We also will be running a range of Parent and Child "Pip and Pap" workshops in school, for Years R-2. Within these sessions, grown ups will work with their child in class, reading together and completing an art activity! These sessions proved very popular last year - please sign up for sessions in advance on Tucasi so that we can organise the correct number of materials for the workshop. Please do also check out the Family Hub HERE for a range of free Pip and Pap phonics materials that compliment the work we do in school, for use at home.
Your child should now have had their Reading Log to track their home reading, as well as a banded reading book (or Free Reader) and library book to take home. You can find out more about how we organise our coloured book bands HERE.
Please don't forget to sign your child's diary when they read at home each day, as we use this to calculate number of reads on our school "Reading Challenge!" Each term the winner of the challenge in each class receives a prize, as a well as a prize for those who have shown good progress in their reading.
EYFS and KS1 children should have all received their first set of Reading Rockets. These words to practise at home compliment the work your child is doing in phonics. These also count as a read, so do sign off any Rocket Word practise in your child's diary! New Reading Rockets for KS2 are set to follow this week, which are linked to the more advanced phonetic code, after completion of the Pip and Pap Phonics Programme.
We are very much looking forward to welcoming local author Jo Clark (creator of Libby and the Highland Heist and Libby and the Parisian Puzzle) into school in October. We will be looking at her books this term in school and partaking in a Q&A about her books and about being a published author! Jo has kindly offered to sign any copies for pupils if you have any of her books at home, please bring them in on the day of her assembly!
Additionally, we look forward to welcoming researchers from Royal Holloway into school to present their findings on 'Do same language subtitles help children to learn to read?'
This study, which we took part in last academic year, investigated whether children in Years 1 through 6 pay attention to subtitles, whether or not they can read them, and whether or not subtitles help them to understand. This presentation will be open to both parents and children and we are so pleased to welcome Professor Kathy Rastle and Dr Anastasiya Lopukhin into school to tell us more about their findings, about Universities and career paths in Science and research.
