Reception Parent/Carers – Rocket Phonics and Reading
Dear Parents / Carers,
Firstly, thank you for all of your support throughout the autumn term in helping support reading and phonics at home. The children are all making progress and are on their way to becoming confident, independent readers. The support that you give children at home is invaluable and by regularly reading with the children, practising their snakes, moons and rockets, you play a huge role in the progress that they make across the Reception year.
We are very proud of how children learn to read in our school and the love that they have for reading. While we have consistently achieved pass marks above the national average in the Year 1 phonics check and have had a consistent approach to teaching phonics in our school, we have had to make some changes in our approach in response to new guidance from the Department of Education in the form of The reading framework: teaching the foundations of early literacy.
New phonics scheme
As a result of this guidance, we have explored a number of Systematic Synthetic Phonics schemes since the beginning of the summer term and after a successful trial period, we have fully adopted Rocket Phonics as our consistent approach across school. Following further work with the author of the scheme, we will be sharing further information with you in the form of online resources, workshops and parent briefings.
Changes to the books children are bringing home
The children in Reception will be bringing home two reading books. The first book is linked to the scheme and contains the sounds that they have been taught in school and have proven that they know during ongoing assessments. In addition to the Rocket Phonics reading book, the children are bringing another book home to share with you; this book is a more challenging book and will contain some sounds and words that the children have shown us that they know but may also contain letters and words that are more un familiar to them. We encourage you to always write in the children’s reading records when you have read with them. This helps us to monitor who is reading regularly at home and where to target additional support if necessary.
eLibrary
In addition to the physical books that the children are bringing home, we are delighted that we have access to a comprehensive eLibrary linked to the Rocket Phonics scheme. We would like to give Reception children access to this eLibrary now, before rolling it out across school after Christmas.
We teach sounds and high frequency words in a specific order in phonics, the eLibrary allows us to allocate Target Practice books that contain the sounds that we teach in school, at the time that we teach them in school. This will give you the opportunity to share a book at home that includes the exact sounds that the children will be learning in school that week. By sharing these at home on a device, it will give the children additional opportunities to apply their new learning and deepen their reading experiences. We’ve assigned the books linked to the sounds that the children have already covered and we will allocate these books on an ongoing basis as and when sounds are introduced. We’d like them to become part of your regular reading routine at home.
We have attached a guide to the eLibrary that you can access with the login details that have been given to children today and will be found in their bookbags.
If you have any questions regarding access to the eLibrary or phonics in school, please contact reception@kingedward.org
Thank you for your continued support and we look forward to sharing more information with you after Christmas.
Miss Byrne and Mr Denton
Rocket Phonics eLibrary User Guide
