Dear Parents/Carers

We are delighted to announce that we have booked a Keeping Up With The Children English course in Term 6. The course is designed to help familiarise adults with the main strategies currently used to teach reading, writing, spelling and handwriting in primary schools. It aims to help parents feel confident in supporting their children's learning of English whilst proving an opportunity to brush up on their own skills. It can be used as a route onto a longer English course with accreditation at the end.

Course content will include:

• Look at how reading is taught in schools with the emphasis on synthetic phonics but including other key strategies.
• Learn the accurate pronunciation of the 44 phonemes and how to use them when blending and decoding words.
• Understand what is meant by tricky words, CVCs, synonyms, alliteration and other English terms and vocabulary which may be new and unfamiliar.
• Explore story sacks and how to make reading fun for reluctant readers.
• Discuss handwriting and practise cursive writing in line with the school's handwriting policy.
• Ideas to encourage writing and VCOP (if used in school).
• Make a selection of phonic and high frequency word resources to support literacy learning at home.
• Discover hints and tips to help learn spellings.
• Play a variety of games to develop speaking and listening skills.
• Explore and evaluate useful literacy resources including dictionaries, thesauruses and those available on line.

The course is for parents/carers only and it will run for two hours every Monday, 9.30am - 11.30am starting on Monday 11th June 2018 and ending six weeks later on Monday 16th July 2018.

The course is completely free! All you will need to bring with you is a pen/pencil and a writing pad. Please let the school office know if you are interested in attending or if you have any further questions/queries.

Many thanks