Help your child with reading

At St Botolph's CE Primary School, we have high expectation of our children as readers and we value reading as an essential life skill that empowers them to achieve their full potential.

Our aims

• To teach every child to become a fluent and confident reader.
• To give children the necessary reading skills to enbable their learning in all subjects across the curriculum.
• To instill a love of learning, in order that each child can become lifelong readers.

Why it is important that children continue their enjoyment of reading

• Reading for pleasure has positive social and emotional consequences.
• There are positive links between reading enjoyment, reading fluency and levels of attainment.
• The more often, and the more widely, you read, the better you become at it!
• Reading helps to develop empathy, language, vocabulary, grammar and imagination.
• Independent reading is the best predictor of children's reading achievement overall.
• Reading for pleasure vastly improves spelling, grammar, writing ability and general knowledge.
• It improves concentrstion and builds new connections in the brain.
• Reading is a great way to relax and/or spend time together.

To help your child reach their full potential, we would like your support in encouraging and enagaging in their reading.

Tips to help support your child with their reading

Here are some points to support you when reading at home with your child. Regular, daily reading is the key to success. Please use the following guidelines to help you:

• Make sure it is a time that suits yourself and your child.
• Make sure you are relaxed and comfortable during the session.
• Mke a special area, preferably quiet and comfortable.
• Encourage your child to read with expression.
• Discuss the meaning of difficut words.
• Ask questions about the character, setting, plot, events in the book etc...
• If your child is not enjoying the book, stop reading it and ask them to change the book.
• Try and make sure that your child reads a range of different books.
• Model the reading process.
• Get caught reading yourself! Let children see you reading in daily life eg, reading newspapers, information boards, noticeboards, recipes, etc...
• Be enthusiastice. Give lots of praise and encouragement.
• If your child is reluctant to read to you, tried paired reading. You read a page and they read a page until they feel confident to read indepdently.
• Keep up a regular dialogue with your child's teacher through the reading diary.

Recommended Reads for children

KS1

Lower Key Stage 2

Upper Key Stage 2

VIPERS question stems

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3

Year 4

Year 5

Year 6