Children Learn to Read and Spell Phonetically.
Get the benefit from the 20 years of
Ms. Maria Zahid
Level Coordinator, BSS
Curriculum Designer, Alphabrains
Kids Reading Skills – English
Reading is a complex and multifaceted process, and children need an approach to learning that integrates many elements. Children who are first learning to read need appropriate help in understanding, learning, and using the spelling-sound conventions of the writing system, as well as opportunities to appreciate the information and pleasures offered by print.
About Mentor?
We are pleased to announce that our Foundation Course Mentor Ms. Mariya Zahid has earned a well-deserved position in Pakistan’s Leading School. Ms. Mariya brings extensive experience in teaching, professional development, and collaboration to her position, along with several years of experience with BSS. An accommodating and versatile individual with the talent to develop inspiring hands-on lessons that will capture a child’s imagination and breed success. She is a professional educator with diverse 20+ years of experience and strong track record fostering child-centered curriculum and student creativity.
Course Directions:
In year 1 at Alpha Brains, your child will have a growing knowledge of phonics and will be building up a range of reading skills. The focus is now on developing their phonics and comprehension skills as they become confident and fluent readers. In first few modules, your child will take the phonics screening check to make sure they are reading at the expected level.
What your child will learn?
Find out how your child will be learning to read in Year 1 (age 5–6):
M1
M2
Assessments
In Year 1 at Alpha Brains, your child will be taught to read the words on the page using phonics. Phonics focuses on building words from sounds. A sound might be represented by a letter (such as ‘s’ or ‘m’) or a group of letters (like ‘ch’ or ‘igh’). Your child will learn the letters (known as graphemes) and the sounds they make (known as phonemes), and how to put them together to read simple words. For example, once they know the individual sounds for ‘s’, ‘a’ and ‘t’ they can blend them together to form the word sat.
In Year 1 at Alpha Brains, your child will continue to learn which sounds the different letters represent. They can then read the separate letters in a word and put them together to read the whole word. This is called blending. So, if your child knows ‘f’, ‘r’ ‘o’ and ‘g’, they can blend them together to read frog.
Some words are trickier to sound out than others. This is usually because the sounds and letters do not match with what has been taught so far, or they are not spelt in a way that can be figured out using phonics. In other words, they are not decodable. The National Curriculum calls these ‘common exception words’, but they are often called tricky words in schools. Your child is likely to meet words like these (for example, ‘said’ and ‘the’) in the books they read. Children are often taught to recognise these words by sight. Some schools send home lists of tricky words so that children can learn them off by heart.
At Alpha Brains, your child will be taught to read words that they can decode already but with an ending (called a suffix) added on. The ending might make the word a plural (more than one) or change the word to show it happened in the past. The endings your child will learn at this age are: –s, –es, –ing, –ed, –er, and –est. Some examples of words with these endings include: ‘cats’, ‘sleeping’, and ‘quicker’.
At Alpha Brains, your child will be taught to read words with contractions, where one or more letter is left out of the word and replaced by an apostrophe. For example: I’m instead of I am I’ll instead of I will we’d instead of we had
In Year 1 at Alpha Brains, your child will build a good knowledge of how phonics works. They should also recognise common exception words (or tricky words). These skills will help them to read books that match their current reading level independently.
Re-reading books is one of the best ways for children to become fluent readers. The National Curriculum encourages children to re-read books, helping them to become more confident with each reading.
Children in Year 1 can often understand more complicated texts than those that they can actually read themselves. Your child will explore stories and texts by taking part in activities such as: ⦁ linking what they read or hear read to their own experiences ⦁ recognising and joining in with predictable phrases (‘Run, run as fast as you can…’) ⦁ learning about rhymes and poems, and learning some by heart (such as nursery rhymes) ⦁ discussing the meaning of words.
Fairy stories and traditional tales are often used with children in Year 1 to help build comprehension. For many children, these stories are already familiar and they feature characters that children know from other books and television. Often, fairy stories and traditional stories are simple and easy to follow.
In Year 1, your child will develop their comprehension by:
⦁ drawing on what they already know or using information provided by their teacher
⦁ checking that they understand stories and texts as they read and correcting mistakes in their reading
⦁ talking about events in stories and why stories have the titles they do
⦁ making connections based on what is said and done in a story
⦁ predicting what might happen next in a story based on what has been read so far
⦁ taking part in a discussion about what is read to them, taking turns and listening to others
⦁ explaining their understanding of what is read to them.
Lots of parents worry about their children’s reading. Fortunately, help is at hand!
Some children can read the words quite well – it’s just that they don’t want to. We call this group of children reluctant readers. For some other children, it is difficult to remember common words or the sounds of the letters from one day to the next. Reading is a slow and painful struggle, distressing for your child and for you. These children can be called struggling readers.