Reading Books  

Your child will bring home books specially selected to support their reading journey.  Shortly after the children join us in Reception, they bring home a decodable shared reader. this contains the Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs)*, that the children have been learning in their phonics sessions. Phonics and shared reading lessons carry on into Year 1 and as such, children continue to bring home a phonics shared reading book weekly.  Some children will continue with daily phonics lessons in Year 2.

When children are confident 'recognising and stretching'* to read most of the GPCs they have learnt, and can also read most red words (Common Exception Words*), they will begin to bring home a ‘reading for pleasure’ book, (these are identifiable by the coloured sticker and number on them).  The point at which this will happen will be different for each child depending on their personal reading journey.   

All children will bring home a library book which they have chosen in their fortnightly class library slot. Your child's class teacher will let you know when their library slot is so the book can be brought back and changed. 

If you have any questions about reading books or the strategies used to support children's reading, please do not hesitate to contact your child's teacher who will be happy to help. 

How you can help at home

Building confidence and fluency with reading takes lots of practice. At St Anne's we are committed to supporting your child's reading progress and will hear them read as a whole class, in groups and one-to-one whenever possible. We ask that parents echo this support at home by encouraging and listening to their child read at least 3 times a week. Often this can be best in the morning or at weekends when your child is feeling less tired. Recording your child's reading in their blue reading record is really key to sharing information between parents and teachers.

Our 'reading strategy checklist' poster can be found below. This checklist provides helpful strategies and prompts to support your child when hearing them read with a view to developing their independence.

If you are concerned about your child's reading or feel you need support in developing reading habits at home, please speak to your child's class teacher in the first instance.

*Grapheme-phoneme correspondence' (GPC) is the relationship between a phoneme (unit of sound e.g. sss) and its graphemes (or symbols e.g. the letter /s/). We use the terminology GPC with children from Reception. 

Learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences helps children to stretch and read a word.  

For example:

c-ar-p-e-t 

car-pet 

carpet 

*Common Exception Words- words that appear regularly in both written and spoken language but do not follow standard spelling rules, e.g. the, are, come

Reading Spine

A love of literature is woven throughout all elements of literacy at St Anne's. We have a reading spine inspired by prominent authors and literacy experts that helps shape the stories and texts we share with the children. On a daily basis, children are read a class story that is taken from the year groups' reading spine. These books are voted each term to allow all children to have ownership over the texts that they hear. Our reading spine also plays a vital part in our teaching of writing, whereby most of our daily writing lessons are underpinned by a key text.