Phonics and Reading – Helping at home!

Improving children’s ability and confidence in reading is vital in support children’s learning and helping them to progress. An important part of that is supporting children’s reading at home. This page aims to help you with understanding phonics and how to use phonics to read with your child and support developing children’s comprehension skills when reading at home. In school we use Oxford Reading Tree, Alphakids and Phonics Bugs reading Schemes.

A really useful website for all things to do with reading, phonics and other areas of English is http://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/. You will need to sign up but it is free to do so. The website has fun things for children to do and useful information for parents and carers of getting children interested in reading.

Phonics

Here are some useful websites to help with practising ‘sounding out’ unfamiliar words:

• You Tube video of correct articulation of individual sounds - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqhXUW_v-1s
• You Tube video of ‘Jolly Phonics’ songs - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCjJYB07aSU
  (In the foundation stage, children begin to learn new phonemes through the Jolly Phonics songs)
• http://www.mrthorne.com/ - This can be used with your children to explore the different phonemes (sounds), practise reading ‘tricky words’ and download as an app to an iPad if you like it!

These websites have good phonics games for children to play. A lot of these websites are used in school so the children should be familiar with them.

• www.phonicsplay.co.uk – popular games include ‘Buried Treasure’, ‘Obb and Bob’ and ‘Dragon’s Den’.
• http://www.familylearning.org.uk/phonics_games.html
• http://www.teachyourmonstertoread.com/ - you will need to create a login for free
• http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/ - full of resources for helping at home
• http://www.ictgames.com/literacy.html

Phonics

Reading

• Once you have registered for free on the Oxford Owl website, you will have access to over 250 free online e-books which the children can read along with. The selection library can be found at this link http://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/reading-owl/find-a-book/library-page
• http://www.magickeys.com/books/ - another website for free children’s books to read online. Some have a function which will read aloud for younger readers.
• http://www.storylineonline.net/ - a great website with books being read to the children
• http://www.lovereading4kids.co.uk/
• http://freekidsbooks.org/

Reading