In short – your support at home really helps and makes a huge difference! Reading, writing and spelling practice at home helps your child to retain the information they have been learning at school.
You are the most important teacher in your child’s life! Research shows that when parents help their children with learning outside school, children do better with things like reading, spelling and counting.
Your child will be given a phoneme or several phonemes to practise at home. Encourage them to say the sound and show you the related action (if applicable). You could ask them to think of words containing the phoneme and ask them to find, read and write words containing their phoneme within their reading books, newspapers, magazines etc. Reading books with your children also really help their general understanding of words and phonemes.
When your child comes home with a list of phonetic and or common words, you could discuss with them what strategy they would use to help them remember how to spell each word. You could also use the Look, Say, Cover, Write and Check method to practise the word. Each teacher will provide strategies for homework also.
To further reinforce the learning, you could also take turns to say simple sentences which contain the phoneme or spelling words, and take turns to be the ‘teacher’ and check each other’s work.
Basically, any input you give really helps your child a lot and we thank you for it! If you would like any more advice on how to help – please contact your child’s teacher.
For some more strategies click here to download or view a helpful booklet.
To see some of the strategies and resources we use click here.
To download and use some of the resources we use in school click here.
