Supporting Your Child with English
Early Reading
As children start school reading behaviours start to change. In addition to children listening to an adult read to them, they begin to read to adults too.
As a parent this transition might feel daunting. Especially as new terminology such as ' phonics', 'blending', 'trigraph', 'graphemes' start being used, which may seem like a whole new language!
Children are taught to read with a 'Phonics first' approach. This means they should sound out c-a-t, then blend the sounds together to say 'cat'. This skill of sounding and blending is demonstrated clearly by the CBeebies programme alphablocks. https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/type/phonics If phonics is new to you then watching a few episodes of alphablocks would be a great place to start. Notice how clipped the sounds are (the sound an M makes is mmm not m'er' for example).
But phonics is just a part of your child's reading journey. It is important to read with your child regularly to help them develop a love of reading. Children should share books for pleasure often. It's hugely beneficial to children if they can have a bedtime story each night and it's also important that children see their parents as readers. Children will take home books from school to support them with their reading skills and you should take time to listen to them read and provide feedback in the reading record book. Please look at the reading advice booklets attatched to support you as you read with your child.
You can access ebooks to supplement your childs reading here: https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/books/free-ebooks/
You can access ideas on quality books which you could read for pleasure with your child here: https://www.booktrust.org.uk/books-and-reading/our-recommendations/
Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is the fastest growing Department for Education-validated phonics programme, already supporting over 5,500 schools to teach every child to learn to read.
At Cartmel we use Little Wandle Letters and Sounds to teach the children in class 1 to read. It is a phonetic scheme and we use the books purchased from Little Wandle to support. We have used this scheme for the past 5 years and have seen great achievements and progress, in particularly our 100% pass rate in the phonics screening check 2025 and 2026.
Children in reception, year 1 or 2 have a daily phonics session and are listened to read three times a week, as part of a guided reading session. When children are confident on alternative graphemes (letters) for phonemes (sounds) we class the children as a free reader. Then, with some initial support, they choose their own books.
https://www.littlewandle.org.uk/resources/for-parents/ The resources on this page will help you support your child with saying their sounds and writing their letters. There are also some useful videos so you can see how they are taught at school and feel confident about supporting their reading at home.
Supporting your child with Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar
Supporting your child with their writing skills can be incredibly daunting. The curriculum uses terminology which the majority of parents would not have come across in their own education. Please find Spelling strategies and other terminology sheets attached to help you.
Files to Download
