Reading

Our school motto is ‘Learning today to change tomorrow.’  As part of that we passionately believe that reading opens the door to all learning.

  • A child who reads a lot will become a good reader.
  • A good reader will be able to read challenging material.
  • A child who reads challenging material is a child who will learn.
  • The more a child learns the more a child wants to find out.

 Learning to read is the most important thing your child will learn at South Petherwin CP School. Everything else depends on it, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible.

We want your child to love reading – and to want to read for themselves. This is why we put our efforts into making sure they develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read.

To help you continue the reading adventure at home as well as at school, the BookTrust HomeTime YouTube channel is full of exciting ways to support and develop a love of reading.

Reading Buddies 
Every half term we all get to explore a range of books, poems and other reading material with our reading buddies. 
The children enjoy time reading texts in different classrooms/ environments with children in a different year group. It is so lovely to see the children share their love for reading. 
Over the last few years we have been working extremly hard on promoting our love of reading throughout the school and at home, lots of work has gone into our school library, making it a welcoming and exciting space to explore a range of texts.
 
We encourage all children and parents to make use of their reading record books as as positive way of communicating between home and school. We love to see what texts are being read at home and praise children for all their hard work.
 
We welcome 'readers' 'into school, this is a fantastic opportunity to allow children to read to as many people as possible, giving children the opportunity to read books aloud stimulates their imagination and expands their understanding of the world. It helps them develop language and listening skills and prepares them to understand the written word.
Accelerated Reader
We are excited that we are able to use Accelerated Reader (AR) as a tool to assist children in finding a book they they enjoy, is suitable for them, that they have chosen independently and that helps to spread the love of reading throughout South Petherwin. See the above documents to explore AR in more depth.
At South Petherwin we aim for all of our children to become fluent, confident and passionate readers committed to becoming lifelong learners. Research suggests that to give our children the very best start in life we must instil a love of reading for pleasure. As an incentive, we recognice the importance of our reading rewards system so that children get rewarded for their reading achievements as often as possible. Reading success and acheivements are celebrated during our weekly celebration assemblies. 
Did you know?
 
The importance of parental engagement to vocabulary acquisition

Researchers looking at the impact of parents reading with their children evaluated how many words children would have heard by the time they were 5 years old:

Never read to: 4,662 words;
1–2 times per week: 63,570 words;
3–5 times per week: 169,520 words;
Daily: 296,660 words;
Five books a day: 1,483,300 words
 
 The reading framework - teaching the foundations of literacy, July 2021
 
 
*Top Tips for Reading Success *
 
Daily reading can make a massive difference to your child's progress.
 
Here are some easy ways you can make reading a part of every day:
 
1. Don’t worry about how long you read for. Every minute spent reading makes a bigger difference than you realise!
 
2. Don’t worry about what your children are reading: recipes, cereal packets, catalogues ... it’s all useful! Keep books and other reading materials close by.
 
3. Reading to children of all ages is helpful. If your little one isn’t reading by themselves yet, read with them.
 
4. Ask lots of questions: Who, what, where, when and why and ask them to summarise when you’ve finished.
 
Make sure you record all of your reading achievements, we love to celebrate these in school too. 
We LOVE to celebrate world book day.