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Reception Blog - Reading at home

Reception blog - special edition

Reading at home 

Today (04.10.21), your child will have taken home a reading book that contains words. This is a very exciting and important milestone in their learning to read journey. We therefore would like to share with parents some extra information about how you can help your child at home. Below, our three key aspects that are important for the children to learn and understand. 

They are: 

  1. Recognising letter sounds 
  2. Segmenting and blending 
  3. High frequency words or tricky words

Letter Sounds

Recognising letter sounds will help your child recognise the individual sounds in words. For example, seeing the letter S and understanding it makes an 'sss' sound. There are 42 letter sounds to learn in total, but so far in Reception we have learnt the following: s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d. Here is Mrs Rudkin discussing how we learn our sounds. 

Letter Sounds in Reception

Segmenting and Blending 

 

Segmenting is the process of breaking a word down into its in individual sounds. E.g. c-a-t 

Blending is the process of combining sounds together to create a word E.g. cat

 

The children need lots of practice of segmenting and blending words when learning to read. We encourage children to do this by using their 'robot arms'. Please encourage your child to use their robot arms when reading at home. Here is an example of Mr Bartle using his robot arms below... 

 

Segmenting and Blending in Reception

Learning to read words by blending requires lots of practice, so we always incorporate the use of robot arms throughout the school day. We often play Simon Says. For example, can you touch your l-e-g? Maybe this is something you could try at home with your child?

 

Below is the process the children will go through when learning to read words. 

 

 

 

High Frequency Words 

High frequency words (sometimes called tricky words) are words that we just need to learn by sight. Recognising these words helps us read simple sentences. The words we are currently  learning are: 

 

is     it     in     at

We hope you found this blog useful and if you have any questions about reading at home please speak to your class teacher. 

 

Thank you. 

 

Mr Bartle and Mrs Rudkin

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