Home Learning

Our approach to home learning in Early Years 

 

Daily Reading

At Lime Wood Primary School, we value daily reading with your child/ren. When parents/carers read regularly with children in a positive and enjoyable way, it has been proven to benefit children by providing them with comfort and reassurance, confidence and security, build self-esteem, develop vocabulary, feed imagination and even improves their sleeping patterns. Therefore, we will be sending home a balance of books for early readers. These will include:

• a reading practice book matched to the child’s phonic stage that they can read independently
• a sharing book that they can talk about and enjoy with their parent/carer.

 

Reading practice book:

Teachers will teach the children how to read the book in school, teaching decoding, prosody and comprehension skills to the children Monday -Wednesday. Your child will then bring this book home with them on a Wednesday evening for them to practice reading with parents/carers. Initially, these books may be wordless. We encourage children to look for words that contain a particular sound. They will then develop to being books with words and then sentences. The children should be able to read the practice book with developing confidence and fluency without any significant help. The parent/carer’s role is to listen with interest and, most importantly, to encourage and praise, enthusiastically acknowledging the child’s achievement (even if, at the early stages, this is only small). After the child has read the book, it may be helpful to talk about the book, but only so far as the child is interested. The parent/carer should keep the experience positive and avoid turning it into a test.

 

Sharing book:

If children are to become lifelong readers, it is essential that they are encouraged to read for pleasure. The desire of wanting to read will help with the skill of reading. To help foster a love of reading, children will take a book home that they can share and enjoy with their parent/carer. These books offer a wealth of opportunities for talking about the pictures and enjoying the story. Parents/carers should not expect their child to read this book independently and should not try to get their child to do so. The book is for the parent/carer to read to or with the child. Again, it is good to talk about the book with the child, but important not to turn the discussion into a test. The goal is enjoyment. 

 

Phonics

We send out on Showbie a guide to parents each week about which graphemes and words the children will have learnt in school that week (from 29th September). This can be used for further practice at home. 

 

Name Writing, Letter Formation and Number Practice

In addition to daily reading, you can support your child by helping them learn to write their name and form numbers and letters.