This year, as a school we are prioritising Reading as one of our literacy areas of focus. Reading is a skill for lifelong learning and the importance of fostering and instilling a love of reading in children from a young age is vitally important. Daily reading helps to increase a child’s attention span, improves memory and concentration, and encourages children to be curious and creative learners.

Reading also helps to develop the 5 essential skills that are important for a child’s development.

These are:

• The ability to hear, respond, and play with individual sounds; referred to as phonemic awareness. 
• The ability to establish a connection between written language and words that come out of one’s mouth. This is known as Phonics. 
• Having a strong vocabulary to be able to communicate or write better. 
• The ability to read something and interpret what is written, in other words, being able to comprehend and understand what they read. 
• The ability to be orally fluent while speaking a language

Reading is a habit and like all habits, it needs repetition and regularity to establish itself. This means consciously making time to read. As a school we are asking families to commit to 5 minutes reading a day. While we encourage children to read at home as much as possible, we are asking children to upload just 5 minutes of their oral reading each day to SeeSaw (Monday-Thursday). This will allow teachers to monitor and track their reading progress throughout the year.

Classrooms are incredibly busy environments and it can be difficult for teachers to listen individually to each child read aloud daily. Some children also shy away from reading aloud and this will enable teachers to hear their reading practice.

What we want you to do!

Details of how to log in to SeeSaw will be sent home today. SeeSaw is an online learning platform and many parents will be familiar with using SeeSaw already and children in the middle and senior classes are very familiar with it. The SeeSaw app can be easily downloaded onto any device e.g. ipad, tablet, smart phone or laptop.

Each child will be given a Read At Home book and we would like them to first practice their assigned reading page and then upload their piece to Seesaw each day. In order to so this, once logged in, children will press the green plus symbol and click on tools. There will be an option to record their reading. Once finished, simply click on the green check mark to submit to their class teacher for feedback.

If you require any additional support using SeeSaw please contact the class teacher for assistance.

We thank you in advance for your continued support.