News

Reading Resources to Use at Home 

To help parents and families who are supporting students learning at home this term, the team at SPELD NSW have brought together some of our favourite online and family friendly resources for student learning to read.   

These resources are great for Kindergarten to Year Two students along with older students who are working on developing their reading skills. 

We know that students learn to read best when explicitly taught phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary knowledge and comprehension and the resources in this blog are grouped together under these skills.   

Join Veronica Alexander from SPELD NSW talking about supporting reading at home: SPELD NSW Supporting your reader at home (vimeo.com) 

 

Phonemic Awareness 

Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and work with the individual sounds in words. Phonemic awareness is important for reading as: 

• when we read we blend sounds together to form words (for example, we blend together the sounds /b/ /a/ /t/ to read the word “bat”); and 
• when we spell we segment words into individual sounds (for example, we would segment the word “slip” into the sounds /s/ /l/ /i/ /p/) 
• SPELD SA phonemic Awareness tasks (free) 
• Phonemic Awareness Kit available from SPELD NSW bookstore 
• Five From Five Parent Phonological and Phonemic Awareness Resources (free) 
• ABC Education Rhyme Activities (free) 
• Reading Rockets Phonological and Phonemic Awareness Activities here and here (free) 

Phonics 

Phonics involves learning the relationships between sounds and letters. The evidence around best practice reading instruction tells us that students benefit from phonics instruction that is explicit and systematic.
When students learn phonics systematically and explicitly, they start out learning that we use individual letters to spell the sounds in words. For example, they learn that: 

• the letter “p” can be used to spell the sound /p/; 
• the letter “a” can be used to spell the sound /a/; and 
• the letter “t” can be used to spell the sound /t/. 

Students can then blend those sounds together to read the words “pat”, “at” and “tap”. They will then go on to gradually learn the rest of the single letter sounds in a systematic manner. After students have learnt all the single letter sounds, they can start to use them to read longer words using those single letter sounds (eg, “blend”, “slip” and “plant”). 

The next concept that students will learn in systematic and explicit phonics program is that two letters can together spell one sound.  The sounds that will be introduced to students are the consonant digraphs (eg. ch, sh, wh, th) and when a letter is doubled at the end of a word to make a single sound (eg, ll, ff and ss). 

After students have mastered the initial part of the phonics code, they can move onto learning about all the different ways that we spell vowel sounds (for example, they will learn that the /A/ sound can be spelt “a”, “ay”, “ai” and “a_e”). Students benefit from explicit instruction and lots of practise of this extended part of the phonics code. 

 

Sounds Write Resources for Parents:

• Help your Child to Read and Write Course Part One and Part Two (Both parts of this course are free at the moment) 
• Sounds-Write Initial Code iPad App 
• Sounds-Write Activity Books 1 and 2 from the SPELD NSW Bookstore 
• Sounds-Write Activities for the Extended Code (free) 

Resources available from the SPELD NSW Bookshop:

• Little Learners Love Literacy have lots of fun phonic games 
• Toe by Toe, Word Wasp and The Literacy Primer are great resources to help students who are struggling to develop literacy skills

Resources available from the DSF Bookshop: 

• Free Phonics At Home Learning Resources (free) 
• Teach your Child to Read in in 100 Easy Lessons 
• Trugs Stage 1, Stage 2 or Stage 3 
• Phonics Activity Pack 

More Great Resources for younger students: 

• Phonics Hero 
• Nessy Reading and Spelling Program 
• Alphabetic Code and Phonics Skills (free) 
• Reading Doctor Apps - Letter Sounds 1, Blending Sounds 1 and Spelling Sounds 1 
• Spelfabet Workbooks and Games  
• Five from Five Letter Sounds Parent Activities (free) 
• Phonic Books UK Printable Resources (free) 

More Great Resources for older students:

• SPELD SA Intensive Literacy Program
• Spelfabet Workbooks and Games  
• Reading Doctor Apps - Letter Sounds 1, Blending Sounds 1 and Spelling Sounds 1 
• Cracking the ABC Code 
• Teen and Adults (TAP) Decodable Stories 
• Banter Speech Decodable Scatter-Slayer Adventure Stories 

The SPELD NSW InfoSheet on Reading Programs to use at Home has some other great options to explore. 

Fluency   

Fluency in reading is the ability to read easily and accurately with few errors.  Fluent readers use proper expression, have grammatically appropriate pauses and correct word emphasis.   

Fluency in reading is achieved when students have gained mastery and automaticity of both phonically regular and irregular words such that their reading seems effortless.  Reading fluency can be  practiced  by reading suitable text using repeated reading.   

For beginning readers, reading decodable texts will allow students to improve fluency and to consolidate the automaticity of letter-sound knowledge and decoding skills. 

SPELD NSW sells a range of decodable readers for students in Kindergarten to Year 2 and also for older students.  

You can also borrow decodable readers from some local libraries and from the Jill Sherlock Memorial Library.  

We have set out below some of the free decodable readers / texts that you can access online:  

• SPELD SA free phonic readers – SPELD SA has an excellent range of free phonic readers that can be downloaded from their website or read on an iPad – here and here  
• Phonic Books UK have published some free decodable readers with their Moon Dog characters doing activities at home.  There are also worksheets to use with each book.  
• Oxford University Press at the Oxford owl website has a range of free decodable ebook readers.      
• Flyleaf publishing have made some decodable readers freely available 
• Fun Phonics free readers  
• Free Phonetic Readers  
• Decodable Readers by Auburn University  
• Core Knowledge have free online decodable readers which can be accessed here and here  

Vocabulary and Comprehension  

Vocabulary is the understanding of the meaning of words and is essential for comprehension. Oral vocabulary is the knowledge of words in speaking and listening and it is the foundation of reading comprehension.  Background knowledge is also essential for reading comprehension.   

Activities that expose students to a wide range vocabulary and background knowledge will help students develop skills in this area: 

• Reading books with and to your child and talking about words and interesting topics, cooking, playing board games 
• Children can also listen to audio books independently – Vision Australia has an audiobook library that people with dyslexia can access for free and many local libraries have audiobooks available 
• Podcasts including – Brains On, Forever Ago, That’s Incredible, Imagine This, this list from Kidspot and this list from Common Sense Media 
• Documentaries and kids news including from ABC Education, Behind the News, this list from Common Sense Media 
• Virtual tours of museums and other sites see here and here