Reading

Practice reading regularly with your child is the key to make outstanding progress. It doesn’t need to always be their reading book. Any text will do. As long as you are reading together, working out the text and discussing what it is telling you. It is obviously important that your child does read their reading book regularly too, but reading other things will help them stay motivated. Try visiting the library and encouraging your child to not only read fiction books, but maybe take out a few books related to other topics they are covering in school.

The ‘Reading Recovery Bridge’ was designed to bridge the learning gap between school and home, after COVID, but is pertinent at any time. Its goal is to help support staff and educate parents in the five components of reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension) and to empower them to help parents to support their child’s abilities in reading after lockdown and beyond and help school staff develop children’s pleasure around reading while developing their reading abilities. It will help parents to understand the components of reading, and how it is taught in school, and how they can support their child to read for pleasure at home, as part of future blended reading plans. It will clarify for staff all the components of the complex reading journey children go on in school. It will also identify how they can work alongside parents to ensure children become lifelong readers.

Reading and COVID

Whilst planning to fully open our schools here in the UK after lockdown, teachers up and down the country have become very worried about children’s reading abilities. For many children access to quality books has been limited during lockdown. Some schools tried to bridge the gap using online resources and digital online reading platforms. However, without daily instruction from a qualified teacher and the opportunity to access levelled reading books some children have been unable to keep up with expected progress and for some children in more deprived areas reading has stopped altogether.

The Reading Recovery Bridge was designed to support parent, when children return to school, to enable them to close the gap between where they are and where they should be. It was also planned to support parents if we need to revisit lockdown status nationally or locally or as part of a blended learning programme.

For teacher the reading recovery bridge brings together all the components of learning to read and allows them to consider how they can support children and families through this interwoven journey. How they can talk to parents about the relationship between the 5 components and developing a love of reading.

What is Blended Learning?

Blended learning is an approach to education that combines online educational materials and opportunities for interaction online with traditional place-based classroom methods. It requires the physical presence of both teacher and student, with some elements of student control over time, place, path, or pace. While students still attend "brick-and-mortar" schools with a teacher present, face-to-face classroom practices are combined with computer-mediated activities regarding content and delivery. This means that both parents and teachers need an agreed understanding of how children learn to read and how important it is that children read for pleasure, as well as for lifelong learning to enable the type of progress needed to ensure a generation of children do not fall behind..

What is the Reading Bridge?

The Reading Bridge is a website designed to bridge the learning gap between school and home. Its goal is to help educate parents in the five components of reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension) as identified by the National Reading Panel. Included in this website are articles, videos, sound clips, charts, assessments, and resources parents can use to help support and build literacy skills with their child. It can be found at: https://www.the-reading-bridge.com/#

The ‘Reading Recovery Bridge’ blends the knowledge of the five components of reading with knowledge about how these are taught to children and how this knowledge can be used to encourage children to begin to read for pleasure. The addition of reading for pleasure is key after COVID. We know need to see children to understand both the need to read for learning and have the desire to read for pleasure.

Why is reading for pleasure important?
Reading for Pleasure during childhood has been identified as having long-term benefits. Individuals who read for pleasure as children had enhanced vocabulary levels 30 years later. The benefits may be because ‘good’ reading habits established during childhood endure through adolescence and into adulthood.

Reading is very important for both young children and adults. For the young reading and listening to stories helps children develop their vocabulary. Children who are read only one book a day will hear about 290,000 more words by age five than those who do not regularly read books with a parent or caregiver.

Reading helps with the development of personal skills and attitudes, it supports and drives attainment and builds general knowledge. It promotes understanding of cultures, human nature and helps with decision-making.

What are the five components of Reading

Phonics is a method for teaching the reading and writing of an alphabetic language (such as English, Arabic and Russian). It is done by demonstrating the relationship between the sounds (phonemes) of the spoken language, and the letters (graphemes), groups of letters, or syllables of the written language.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds-phonemes--in spoken words. Before children learn to read print, they need to become more aware of how the sounds in words work.

Please see the information on our phonic pages:

Phonics (Parents - Curriculum menu tab)

Vocabulary is the knowledge of words and word meanings. Vocabulary plays an important part in early literacy as a tool for children to rely on when decoding unfamiliar words and in comprehending, or understanding, what they are reading.

Reading fluency is an important focus of literacy teaching, and can be thought of in two different but complementary ways:

Reading fluency has a qualitative definition, referring to the quality of students' reading. This includes the use of rhythm, phrasing, intonation, naturalness, and use of voice (for different characters/moods);
Reading fluency also has a quantitative definition, referring to the accuracy (number of errors, compared to number of correct words read) and the rate (number of words read per minute).

Quality and efficiency together are indicators of fluent reading, and are necessary for reading achievement, but not sufficient.

Reading comprehension is the ability to process text, understand its meaning, and to integrate with what the reader already knows. Fundamental skills required in efficient reading comprehension are knowing meaning of words, ability to understand meaning of a word from discourse context, ability to follow organization of passage and to identify antecedents and references in it, ability to draw inferences from a passage about its contents, ability to identify the main thought of a passage, ability to answer questions answered in a passage, ability to recognize the literary devices or propositional structures used in a passage and determine its tone, to understand the situational mood conveyed for assertions, questioning, commanding, refraining etc. and finally ability to determine writer's purpose, intent and point of view, and draw inferences about the writer.