“Read in the name of Your Lord…” Quran (96:1)

Reading at Iqra

How we teach reading Throughout the year, children from nursery often visit IQRA to partake in reading for pleasure visits. Once at Iqra, we start by building on the synthetic phonics taught at nursery, by teaching phonics in Reception using the highly successful ‘Read Write Inc’ phonics programme. In this programme, children learn how to read the sounds in words and how those sounds can be written down. This is essential for reading, but it also helps children to spell. For more information on the ‘Read Write Inc’ phonics programme follow this link: http://www.ruthmiskintraining.com/en/ Once children can blend sounds together to read words, they practice reading books that match the phonics and the ‘tricky words’ they know. In the summer term, we do a phonics check of all the Year 1 children. We will let you know how well your child has done. How long will it take to learn to read well? Every child is different and children will learn to read at different speeds. By the end of year 2, most children will be able to read aloud books that are at the right level for his or her age. In Year 3, and beyond, we concentrate more on helping children develop key skills of understanding what they are reading. For example, to predict or evaluate. At all stages in a child’s reading development at Iqra teachers regularly read and model to the children.

Learning to read is one of the most important things your child will learn at our school. Access to the whole curriculum depends on it, so we share our passion and enthusiasm of reading to make sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible with accuracy and enthusiasm. At Iqra, we want your child to love reading – and to want to read for themselves. This is why we work hard to ensure that children develop a love for reading as well as simply learning to read. We invest heavily into our class libraries, school library, trips to Slough library and our reading curriculum.

What can parents/carers do to help?

• Within the first term of your child starting in a year group, you will be invited to a meeting so that we can explain how we teach reading and show you the resources we use. During the meeting, there are lots of suggestions on how you can help your child to read. Your support really does get your child off to a flying start and encourages them to make great progress!
• You can help your child to sound out the letters in words and then to ‘blend’ the sounds together to make a whole word. Try not to refer to the letters by their names. Help your child to focus on the sounds. You can hear how to say the sounds correctly by searching on YouTube for ‘Read Write Inc. Phonemes Pronunciation Guide’
• Make reading fun! Remember to keep reading to your child. They will come across far more adventurous words than they will in their early reading books. You will be helping them to grow a vast vocabulary and understand the meaning of different stories etc. It will also encourage them to love books and want to read more!

If you have any further queries about how we teach reading, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.