Reading at Home

Reading at Home

At Over St. John’s, we encourage the daily reading and sharing of books at home. We carefully monitor the children’s reading at home through the use of our online reading log and encourage parents to be fully active and engaged with us in this in order to support their child’s ongoing development. 

Throughout the school, in each class, children will take the following books home every week:

• 1 x reading book matched to their current reading level. In EYFS and Year 1, these will be phonically decodable based on sounds that have been taught and are secure with the children. 
• 1 x library book for reading / sharing for pleasure

Home reading books are organised into stages. Children in Reception and Year 1 read phonetically decodable books which follow the teaching sequence of our Phonics scheme, Monster Phonics. Children in Reception and Year 1 will only ever bring reading books home with sounds in they have been taught in school to consolidate this learning. Over the course of Reception and Year 1, children will read through books from Stage 0 (wordless books) to Stage 8. Children in Reception and Year 1 will come home with a guide for sharing their phonetically decodable books over a week with their adults. 

Towards the end of Year 1, children will be assessed on their reading in order to move from phonetically decodable books and to continue to progress through the rest of the stages. Our books within Stage 9 to Stage 18 are grouped according to their level of difficulty, providing children with a challenging reading experience which also allows them to build on and use their phonic and whole word knowledge to read independently. Within our Stages 9 to 18, we have a mixture of Fiction, Non-Fiction, Traditional Tales and Poetry books that the children can access. This is further supplemented by a wide range of reading material that has been selected and appropriately matched using the Accelerated Reader Programme

Reading at home can take on the following forms:

• Independent reading of a school book.
• Sharing a book together.
• Talking about the book together and answering questions about it.
• Reading and sharing a variety of reading materials.

Children may choose to read a book they have read before. This is great. This helps to familiarise themselves with the text and type of book as well as developing fluency and confidence in reading.

Once your child has read the book to you at home, please send the book back to school to be changed. This also applies to Key Stage Two children who maybe reading to themselves. Reading books need to be in school every day.

Every time your child reads to you or to themselves (Year 5 and 6), please record this on their online reading log.

Online Reading Log

We have continues to use the online reading log for the recording of reading at home, through an online platform called Learning with Parents. Each week, you will receive an email or text from Learning with Parents with a secure weekly reading link to your child’s log. This secure link will take you straight to your child’s reading log home page.  You can log your child’s reading by leaving a comment, photograph or audio clip. The class teacher then receives your feedback and photographs so they can see how your child is getting on. Teachers will acknowledge this reading with a tick.

The online reading logs will be checked weekly by an adult in school and reading is rewarded through our school raffle ticket reward system. For each read recorded on the online log, children will receive a raffle ticket.

Children must read at least 4 times a week to complete their weekly target of 4 reads.

Once they have reached their weekly target, they will receive a sticker on their online reading log.

This year the children will be ‘Reading the Rainbow.’ See the attached file at the bottom of the page for more information at the bottom of the page. 

Children must read at least 4 times a week to complete their weekly target of 4 reads and this will be recorded on the online reading log. Children will be recognised for their reading at home as below. 

Amount of times read each week	Number of Weeks	Award
4	4	Red Certificate
4	8	Orange Certificate
4	12	Yellow Certificate
4	16	Green Certificate
4	20	Blue Certificate
4	25	Indigo Certificate
4	30	Violet Certificate
4	33	Platinum Star Badge

School Library

The School Library is open every TUESDAY during term time from 3:00-3:30pm. 

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