English

Supporting Literacy At Home

Reading

Ask questions about their reading; who as the main character? What did they do? Why do you think that? Would you do the same thing? What do you think happens next?
Encourage relatives and friends to give books as gifts.
Join your local library!
Keep an eye out for the themes that catch your child's imagination at school - and help follow it up with more reading.
Read all kinds of materials – stories, poems, newspaper articles, magazines and comics.
Talk about a character in the book – ask questions such as ‘What does he/she look like?’, ‘What do you think they would like for breakfast?’….
Choose an article from a newspaper and discuss it together.
Draw a picture of a character and do a spider web brainstorm around the picture of good describing words or phrases.
Draw a picture with speech bubbles.
Write a letter to a book character.
Let them be the teacher: you read their books and they correct you!
Encourage and praise!!

Writing

Practise telling stories at home, this will help with sequencing and development of story language eg ‘all of a sudden the Big Bad Wolf came back!”
Play ‘Guess Who’ describing games. Children could describe different members of the family using specific words and phrases for appearance. On the way to school who can be the first to spot an ‘emerald’ car, a ‘gigantic’ building etc. ‘I spy’ works very well for this too! Eg ‘I spy some thing that looks like…’
How many words can you think of that mean the same as big? Small? Hot? Ugly? Write the words on cards or post-its and try and arrange them in order of size or strength.
Sentence pyramids. Choose a basic sentence (eg The man walked down the lane) and extend it using how/where/why/when prompts.

Eg The man walked down the lane

The man walked slowly down the lane

The postman walked slowly down the dusty lane

The postman walked slowly down the dusty lane looking for his lost keys.

Children could be encouraged to keep story ideas in their writing journals and record any interesting describing words they have come across in their reading, eg: ‘The castle glittered in the sunlight’.
Ask the children to choose some interesting words from their reading books. Can they use those in their writing?

Spelling/Phonics

Practise daily the spellings and key words that are sent home; use them in everyday language so they become part of your child’s vocabulary.

Useful Websites

For grown ups: