Reading
New reading books will be issued to the pupils today (07/10). Please hear your child read their book all the way through at least once before Thursday. Please ensure your child has brought their book with them on Thursday in order for them to refer to the text when working on reading tasks in class.
Supplemental Reading Tasks
I’m often asked by parents how they can help support their child’s reading at home. The best advice I can give is to provide access to books your child can read. Read, read, read! Age appropriate novels, comics, magazines etc are all prime examples of reading material to help engage your child. I’m often told that boys won’t read anything except their homework book as they’re glued to their PS5 or Xbox. In that case there are a few gaming magazines aimed at children in the shops – usually with a free gift taped to the front. Even in the games themselves there will be plenty to read in menus, context sensitive button prompts and so on. There are plenty of football mags for children out there if your son spends most of their free time at Stewarton Annick instead of digging up gems in Minecraft. There are a wide range of magazines out there aimed at girls – more than for boys it seems.
Being able to read the words is only a part of it however. Understanding what is written is just as important (especially in school when it comes to measuring reading attainment and organising groups). Ask your child questions about their book, simple ones like what colour of hat is x wearing? Who is that character? To deeper questions like why is that character feeling sad? For non-fiction, children can be encouraged to give you a certain number of facts from the text, or to tell you something they didn’t know before they read the book/magazine. Many of the reading scheme books we have in school have parents’ guides printed inside the front and back covers, with suggested activities for you and your child.
Spelling/Literacy 07/10/24
This week there I have sent home a list of words using a new set of consolidation phonemes. There is also a ‘make your own word-search’ sheet which was demonstrated for the pupils this morning. Homework can be returned following the October break.
Supplemental Spelling Tasks
If you wish to further support your child in their spelling at home, here are some examples of optional tasks that can be done using any of the word lists given out over the course of the year – some of these may be familiar to the pupils from work in class, or indeed be given as the main homework task during the year:
Rainbow Writing
Pupils copy the words at least once using any colour of pencil for the consonants, but writing the vowels in red.
Phoneme Hunt
Using your child’s reading book or any book at home, the child scans the book for any words containing the phoneme they have been learning that week in class and notes them down.
Sentences
Simple enough – ask your child to put each word into a sentence to give the word context and show that they understand what it means.
Read and Draw
Give your child a sentence containing one of the words from their spelling list and ask them to draw what the sentence says.
Look, Cover, Write, Check
An old one but a good one! Simply put, show your child the word, hide it, and ask them to write it. Then show the word to allow them to check their spelling. If you want them to copy it out several more times that’s up to you.
