Are you the parent or carer of a young child, keen to help with school work at home - but worried that you might not do a good job? Caroline Coxon is here to help with a quick overview on how best to help a child with their reading and writing. This book will: give you ideas for activities; give you advice on choosing the right time and situations to encourage reading and writing practice at home; show you what schools are trying to do; show you what children are expected to learn at a given age; and give you an insight into phonics and the National Literacy Strategy. Presented as a colourful and easy-to-follow guide, this book will demystify what children are being taught in school and will show you that there are many ways you can help your child with their reading and writing at home. Most of all, it will show you that you are the very best person for the job. The book will give you the incentive to spend quality time with your child so that you can learn together and improve your child's chances to do well and be happy in school. Not only that: it gives you the opportunity to have lots of fun along the way!

 

This book is aimed at children in primary school. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 80 pages in this book. This book was published 2007 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC .

Caroline Coxon is a freelance writer. In addition to producing books, websites and CD-ROMs for schools, she has written audio stories for children, and her first screenplay is about to be filmed. Caroline lives in East Sussex.

This book has the following chapters: Why is literacy important?; What can you do to help; -Choose a good place; -Choose a good time; -Be clear about what you're doing; -Be creative, make it fun!; -Be positive; -Work together; -Teach by example; Introduction to literacy in schools. -The National Literacy Strategy; -Literacy Hour; -Key Stages; -Attainment targets and levels; -Standard Attainment Tests (SATs); Literacy at home; -When should we start?; -What's first?; -What's next?; Reading; -How children begin to read - words and pictures; -Phonics - not as tricky as it sounds!; -Other reading strategies; -High frequency words; -Dictionary delight; -Going to the library; Writing; -First things first; -Having fun!; -Forming letters; -Writing at last!; -Handwriting; -Practising at home - writing for a purpose; -Spelling; -Punctuation and grammar; -Writing stories; Glossary; Useful websites, books and equipment.