Reading is a complex skill and at OLOR, our focus on classroom reading, students engaging in more literature, having a structured morning reading routine, library time, and teachers reading to students every day through Read Alouds is a considerable focus at our school. All this and more is happening in the classrooms daily. To help parents understand how complex the teaching of reading is, I have referenced for you this week, 'The Reading Rope'.

The Reading Rope is a great visual representation of the complexities of learning to read. The rope consists of lower and upper strands. The word-recognition strands (phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of familiar words) work together as the reader becomes accurate, fluent, and increasingly automatic with repetition and practice. Concurrently, the language comprehension strands (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge) reinforce one another and then weave together with the word-recognition strands to produce a skilled reader. This does not happen overnight; it requires instruction and practice over time. You might like to learn more by watching this The Science of Reading Basics, Part 3: Scarborough’s Reading Rope 

READING AT HOME  

When sharing stories together at home conversations about the story can support your child in strengthening many of the skills needed to become fluent readers. You might build vocabulary by discussing the meaning of unknown words and searching for these in a dictionary. You can build your child’s background knowledge by making connections between what you read and other stories or your own life experiences. Encouraging your child to retell the main parts of the story will help to develop the literacy knowledge and language structures. This will support children when it comes to experimenting with language features when writing their own texts. 

Mel Steele
Leader of Learning