Once children start to learn the first sounds in their reading journey, they will begin to read these sounds in books. To begin with they will read sound blending books. The sound blending books consist of CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words and gradually progress through the sounds. The children will work their way through the sound blending books at the same pace that they learn the sounds in school. There are ten sound blending books.
The next stage is Red Ditty books. Again, the books that children bring home will be very closely matched to their current reading ability and will include sounds and red words that the children are learning in school at the same time. This means that the children should not see any new sounds or words whilst reading their home readers; the aim of this is to give the children confidence when reading at home.
Children will continue to move through the colour books as their reading ability progresses.
The aim of the home reader is to consolidate the sounds and words that the children have learnt so far, their comprehension and expression but most importantly; to develop their fluency when reading. For this reason, books are given out once a week and kept for the whole week with the vision of them reading the same book over and over and over at home. The reason for this is that on the first read, the sounds and ‘red’ words may be fairly new to them and they will need to use ‘Fred Talk’ out loud to read the words E.g. ‘c-a-t, cat’. The more they read the book and the more familiar they become familiar with the words in it, we can encourage them to not ‘Fred Talk’ out loud but to ‘Fred in their Head’ and then read the word, eventually moving on to speedy reading.
They may also now recognise the ‘red’ words that they’ve seen a few times before and therefore can be encouraged to just read them quickly. Hopefully, across the week the children’s reading will sound less ‘robotic’ and more fluent. We can show the children an example of this by Fred talking words/reading like a robot and then read fluently with expression as well and then ask the children if they can spot the difference. Which one sounds better? Why?
In this reading section of the website, you will find 4 example videos of what reading at the beginning of the week may look like compared to what it may look like at the end of the week. I hope you find these useful.