At Wilshere-Dacre there has been growing success in reading. Much of this success can be attributed to the support and encouragement that children are given from reading with parents at home. Strong home-school partnerships are highly beneficial to reading development throughout your child’s time at Wilshere Dacre.

During the course of the academic year, each child will be assessed on their reading age and their comprehension and decoding skills. This will allow the children to demonstrate how well they are able to understand a text, as well as how to process the language and authorial choices made within a piece of writing. By harnessing these skills, the children will gain a greater understanding in reading.

Your child will bring home their reading book and reading record each day to allow them to read daily with an adult at home. Each child will be given a starting colour book band which is in correlation with their reading age and their end of summer results. To ensure your child is gaining the most from home reading, please consider the ‘top tips’ below:

Top tips when reading at home:

1. All readers make mistakes and it is sometimes necessary to prompt if the child is losing the flow of a story. However, it is not always advantageous to provide words too quickly as this prevents the child re-reading and correcting the mistake spontaneously. It is also sometimes more useful to encourage young readers to guess at the meaning by using the context of the passage or pictures. This helps the child to develop useful strategies, which will lead to greater fluency and independence with reading.

2. If your child is struggling with so many words that it disrupts the flow, this might indicate that the text is too challenging at that time. If this is the case, it may provide encouragement and support to read the text aloud in unison with your child.

3. Ask questions about the text. Discuss themes, characters, settings and actions.

4. Above all, reading should be an enjoyable experience. Adults can become a lot more involved with their child’s reading by being interested in not only the child’s performance, but also in the material that they are reading. Adults, who laugh at humorous stories, or make guesses about what will happen next, are modelling behaviour that carries important messages about reading to children.

5. Communication is key. Please comment in your child’s reading record so that the class teacher can see and celebrate the enjoyment of a book that your child is reading at home.

As the academic year progresses, your child will be assessed termly by their class teacher ensuring they are reading the correct band level and that they are choosing texts that both excite and challenge their reading ability.