Ready To Learn Every Day!

Have fun speaking and listening together

• Play family games together, like I Spy, Charades, Chinese Whispers and Articulate
• Nursery rhymes, songs, jokes and puppets are an important way of helping younger children learn language
• Re-tell familiar stories and have fun making up your own
• With older children, read books and poetry aloud together
• Discuss and debate issues in the news

NAHT and Family Action have based the advice in the leaflet below on the latest research about what helps children to speak and listen well.

To view the leaflet, please click the link below

https://www.family-action.org.uk/get-involved/companies/current-supporters/supporting-school-readiness-naht/

Helping your child to develop a love of books and reading

“Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” Emilie Buchwald

The best way to encourage a love of reading in your child is for you to enjoy reading books with them. Children of all ages love listening to stories.Younger children delight in just talking about what they see in the pictures.  It doesn't matter if they want to have the same story over and over again as this is part of learning to read. Even when your child is a fluent reader they will enjoy being read to and being able to talk about the book with you.

Joining a library is a great way to have free access to a wide range good quality books. Choose any that interest your child, try fiction and non- fiction. Stories on disc are great to listen to on long car journeys and can also be borrowed from a library for a small fee.

As a parent you can play an important role in helping your child learn to read. Research shows that children who are helped at home make better progress in school. If children enjoy reading, it will benefit their whole education and they are more likely to carry on reading as adults.

Your child will always have a school reading book to bring home to read to you. This gives them the opportunity to show you their reading skills and enables them to practise their reading with you. Reading a book more than once when they are a beginner reader is helpful. It is good for children to hear themselves read well.

Along with a reading book each child has a bookmark with the phonic sounds they are learning at school on one side and questions on the other side, which you can ask to help them to think about and understand what they have read.

Reading with your child should be a special time for both of you so set a regular time to find a quiet, comfy place to sit, with no distractions such as the TV and enjoy the book together.

 Your child's class teacher will teach your child a range of strategies to enable them to become a fluent reader and to understand what they are reading.  As their reading progresses they will read books with more complex sentences. They need to learn to phrase their reading and use different tones of voice so that the reading 'sounds' like talking. This is easier for children who have shared books and heard lots of stories at home, where expression and different voices have been used to make the story fun and enjoyable.

Your class teacher or Miss Appleford,  who runs our School Library and sources our reading books, will always be happy to answer any questions and give strategies to support you  reading at home with your child.

Handwriting at Meryfield

 We have high aspirations and expectations for all children at Meryfield and we know handwriting is a vital skill for life. It is important that a child’s handwriting becomes a skill that requires little effort and thought so that creative and physical energy can be focused on the content of writing rather than upon the act.

The most widely recommended handwriting style is cursive and this is the approach we will now teach children at Meryfield. Cursive handwriting teaches pupils to join letters and words as a series of flowing movements and patterns. The style is quick and easy to learn, particularly when it is practised from an early stage and will support the development of phonics and spellings. Pupils will learn to form individual letters appropriately and accurately first, and then during Key Stage 1, begin to learn to join letters. Research shows that by joining handwriting from an early stage, spelling patterns are easier to embed and letter reversals are avoided.

The key advantages to writing in this way are:

• by making each letter in one movement, children’s hands develop a ‘physical memory’ of it, making it easier to produce the correct shape;
• because letters and words flow from left to right, children are less likely to reverse letters which are typically difficult (like b/d or p/q);
• there is a clearer distinction between capital letters and lower case;
• the continuous flow of writing ultimately improves speed and spelling.

In the Handwriting Policy (Please find this in the pencil labelled About Us/Statutory Information/ Curriculum/Handwriting Policy) is an example of the alphabet using the cursive font and an example of a sentence using joined writing to help you to support your children when they are writing at home. When children are completing their homework journals please do encourage them to practise the joins they have learnt in school. In addition, they may like to do extra handwriting practice which we would always be delighted to see! Ideally children should complete their homework using a pencil, unless they have been given a pen license. Children will be given a pen license in year 2 or 3 when their teacher thinks that their handwriting and presentation are well formed and are consistent across a range of subjects.