Year 1 Home Reading: Some Changes & Easy-To-Follow Wonderful Advice!

Dear Parents and Carers,

You may notice some changes to the readers and reading activities that your child is bringing home this year.

Children require substantial practice to develop their reading skills to the point of fluency.

10-15 minutes of practice at home with a supportive adult can make all the difference!

This can enable children to apply letter-sound knowledge to reading simple texts.

The readers that your child will bring home will contain words that they can ‘sound out’.

You will notice the vocabulary in these books is very controlled.

This is because at this early stage of the reading process, words need to follow regular sound-symbol patterns, so that children are given opportunities to work out words for themselves, with your support.

Some of these decodable books may look ‘easier’ than some of the books your child may have received previously.

However, teachers have conducted thorough assessments that have identified your child’s instructional level, so that learning occurring in the classroom, is then consolidated at home.

If your child is still learning letter-sound correspondences, a reader may not be appropriate for them yet.

If this is the case for your child, you will receive other phonics activities to work on, until such time that they are independently blending some simple words.

Guessing words from a picture or from context should not be encouraged.

Instead, encourage your child to look at the letter-sound combinations and think about the sounds they represent.

When your child gets stuck on a word, encourage them to have a go at sounding out the word.

If necessary, demonstrate what this looks like first.

Please do not prompt your child to guess a word or use the picture to help them – reading is not about guessing.

This may have once been the case – however, current research indicates this is not an effective reading strategy for children.

Should you have any questions, please contact your child’s teacher or myself directly – 

Yours faithfully

Christina Jasem
Head of Literacy Development (Prep – Year 6)