Curriculum Chat

Reading - how we teach it at Dayboro State School and how you can help your child

Children develop their language skills through the language they hear and read. In the early stages of reading instruction while children are developing their decoding skills, it is very important that they are read to often, so they hear lots of new words and learn about new things that they may not yet be able to read about themselves.

Parents play an important role in helping children learn to read by both:

• listening to your child read aloud to practise decoding words (not encouraging them to guess the word but encouraging and helping them to sound out the sounds in the word and then blend them together).
• reading aloud to your child to build their understanding of language and literacy.

Learning to read is a process that needs step-by-step teaching and plenty of practise at school and at home. Unlike walking or talking, reading is not a skill that we learn naturally — everyone needs to be taught how to read.

Reading requires two very important skills:

• decoding (reading) the words on the page. At a young age, written words are like a code to children, just like any complex code is to us. We need to learn the skills in order to understand the code or break the code down so it is able to be read/understood. When children are learning to read it is called ‘decoding’.

• making meaning from the words, sentences and paragraphs that are read.
  For children to learn how to decode words, they need to understand how sounds and letters link together to make sense.

Your child will be explicitly taught to read at school using an approach called systematic synthetic phonics. This approach teaches children how sounds and letters link together to form words that we can read and write. It provides students with a reliable strategy for decoding unknown words and discourages guessing.

What does the term systematic synthetic phonics mean?

• Phonics is the understanding that letters and letter combinations represent speech sounds.
• Systematic means that letters and sounds are taught in a planned order.
• Synthetic refers to the process of synthesising or blending the sounds and letters to decode (read) words, and the segmenting or pulling apart of sounds and letters to encode (spell) words.

Using a systematic synthetic phonics approach, children are taught the letter-sound correspondences that represent all 44 sounds in English, gradually, over time. Students are first taught the most common and consistent letter-sound correspondences (for example: the letter ‘b’ in ‘ball’; the letter ‘v’ in ‘van’) before being taught the less common alternative letter-sound combinations (for example: the many ways we can represent the long ‘a’ sound — bay, break, tail, sleigh and so on).

In the younger years, your child will practise their word reading skills by using decodable texts. Decodable texts contain only the letter-sound correspondences that your child has already learned. They may also contain some high-frequency words that the teacher has taught simultaneously.

Decodable texts are important for beginning and struggling older readers as they provide immediate practise of their new skills in segmenting and blending, and their understanding of letter-sound correspondences, to build automaticity, fluency and confidence.

Once children have read words by blending the sounds together many times, they may remember the word and be able to recognise it immediately by ‘sight’. Over time, as children get older and become more confident readers, they will be able to recognise many words without have to decode them. This is when more complex phonetic and morphology patterns / rules are taught.

Never underestimate the value of reading to or with your child, even if they are older. So many conversations can come from texts and it is quality time that has a range of benefits. 

Some explicit reading instruction in classrooms this week.

Dee Mathiesen

Head of Curriculum