The Power of Picture Books - Recommendations!

For today's blog, I wanted to share with you some of my absolute favourite books, whilst also hopefully dispelling the myth that picture books lose their value once children start reading.

First, the power of pictures! Celine Dion missed an educational opportunity, I think, when she wrote 'The Power of Love' instead, but we can't all be reading focussed like Flourish, so we'll let her off. Pictures are an incredible part of a reader's toolkit, and, when they're present, they provide an enormous amount of context and clue-finding opportunity for our readers to gather more information about the story/text.

They're more than that, however. They are also inspiration. They are the depiction of something that words can perhaps not quite capture. They express an emotion, a situation, or a complex interaction in a way that might take page upon page of description and scene building. Have a look at this picture from the unbelievably talented Shaun Tan's 'The Red Tree', in which the main character of the book is having a really, really bad day and feels awful about everything (before eventually finding hope and joy):

The above picture evokes so many subtle emotions that we can barely do justice in words alone. Notice the deep, dark sky, how she is trapped in a bottle that is slowly filling up with rain that is directed specifically at her. Notice the blue sky being pushed away from her and the diver helmet that isolates her from her peers. The page has but two words on it, but to a reader, it captures hundreds more for us to digest and enjoy. Here's another, different picture:

What can you see here? What feelings is she experiencing? Where is she? What might that floating object represent? Is it a scary or wonderful object? How do you know?

The questioning and evidence finding you can encourage children to do here is unparalelled, and deeply important to their progress as readers. More than that, though, these books are inspiring, moving and teach us more about the emotional mind than we might even preconceive.

Thus, my advice is as follows: Look at Shaun Tan (and a range of other similar authors!) and start a journey of unbelievable power; the power to find, to imagine, to love and to feel. Reading has never been this good.

Some recommendations of books from Shaun Tan:

Phonics - What?! Why?!

This week we are exploring the intriguing world of PHONICS. I certainly wasn’t aware of phonics until I started my teacher training many years ago. However, once I understood it I realised what a powerful learning tool it is. Now, we must remember that SOME children simply do not learn this way and if that is the case with your child, do NOT worry as phonetic learning and understanding is only one skill of many which we, as teachers, teach.

What is phonics?

Phonics simply means the sounds of the letters we use in reading and writing.

Phonics is a way of teaching children how to read and write. Phonics taught well will enable children to start reading and writing at an early age. It helps children hear, identify and use the different sounds which make up words.

I suppose you could say that the written language is like a code. Unlock the code and you open the door to reading and writing. If children know the sounds of individual letters and how they sound when combined, they will be able to start decoding words as they read. This also relates to writing. If our children can sound out a word in their head and know what the written representations are for those sounds, they are able to write.

Of course we know that not all words can be sounded out for reading and writing (take ‘the’ for example) but that’s for another blog!

So. Step by step. How is phonics taught?

Successful phonics teaching is based on truly developing our children’s listening skills and teaching it in a carefully structured way. Oh. And of course plenty of practice!

PHASE 1

Phase 1 is the foundation for all phonetic teaching and learning.

Listening.

In order for our children to be able to hear the sounds in words, they need to be able to listen. This phase starts from birth, as babies start to recognise your voice, and   continues throughout their education.

In the early years of their education we play lots and lots of listening games;            identifying animal noises, sounds around us, everyday sounds.

PHASE 2

Phase 2 is when we start to introduce letter sounds. To begin with, the most common letters we work on are s, a, t, p, i, n.

The reasons for this are simple.

Once children know these sounds they can start playing with them and putting them together to make words.

at, in, sat, pin, tap, pat, pan

These are just a few. As they learn more sounds the more words they can access. The key is lots of repetition. At school we play many games to help them learn these sounds.

¨ Flashcards - start with just a few and gradually add more. Try showing one card, eg; s, and asking them to look for it as you go through the cards. Then they have to point when they see it.

¨ Try writing each letter on a piece of paper and get your child to play around putting different letters together. Make it even better by using different things, eg; stones, lego bricks, counters, carpet floor tiles. Even, even better is making it physical. Use hoops in the garden with one letter in each. Sound out a word and get your child to jump into each corresponding hoop.

I could write a whole blog just on games!

It is important for your child to not just practise hearing and reading the letter sounds but also writing them. Just to clarify, we call the sound we can hear a phoneme           (f-oh-n-ee-m) and the written letter it represents, a grapheme (g-r-a-f-ee-m). And   believe me, children love to learn these grown-up words!

PHASE 3

Now we reach Phase 3. This is where it starts to get more complicated. Or, in my view, more exciting!

The English language is one of the most complicated to learn (great) as not only do single letters make a sound, many words have two or even three letters which make one sound. Confused? Don’t be. Here are some examples but there are more.

Sh         S and h together make one sound - ’sh’.

              Ship, shop, fish

Some others are;

Ch, th, ng, oo, ee, ar, ow, igh

Again, we do lots of repetition, play lots of games and do lots of practise of hearing, reading and writing these sounds. One quick game to play (and great if your child does NOT want to read their reading book today) is to write one sound down on a post-it note and say to your child they don’t have to read today…….just see if they can find the sound in their reading book.

Of course, little do they know they ARE reading - they have to read to find the sound. Devious? Probably. Helping their development? Absolutely.

PHASE 4

I think I mentioned before that the English language is complicated. Here we go with the next puzzle to unlock.

We know the sound that ‘f’ makes. But of course it can also be ‘ff’. Even funnier still is that ‘ph’ also makes the ‘f’ sound as in ‘phonics’.

Take ‘ch’. Look at the words ‘chair’ and ‘choir’. Same two letters but make a different sound.

What about j/g/ge/dge?

jug                  giraffe                       garage            dodge       

That leads us on nicely to, using the technical term, split e digraphs.

a-e             e-e          i-e          o-e          u-e

Spot them in these words…

cane              these           kite          bone          tune

The ’a’ and ’e’ are separated by another letter. The job of the ’e’ here is to change the vowel sound from what we call a  short vowel sound (can) to a long vowel sound (cane).           

This might all sound super complicated but our children are like little sponges and       believe it or not, they LOVE it! Just play, play, play and they will soon pick it up.

Please let us know if you would like to read more about phonics or if you have any questions.

KS2 Reading - Asking the right question!

Today’s blog offers a focus on KS2 children and their reading - in particular preparing them for SATs - and being effective at understanding everything they’re consuming. I want to focus on the importance of asking the right questions, and how we can encourage our young readers to engage with texts at all levels to create deep analysis. With the right questioning, even the toughest text can be pulled apart and understood. First though, here’s some fun facts:

• Research suggests that 95% of the words in the text need to be understood to read successfully.

• 73% of children pass their SATs reading paper in Year 6 nationally (2023 data)

• It is estimated that a frequent reader should read about 44 books a year. Infrequent readers can read as little as 5-22 books.

• Children who read regularly and talk about books and language can learn up to 5000 words a year!

Why did I decide to share these wonderful facts? It’s simple really; how do we give our children the best chance to succeed? We know that reading at home and in school is massively important, but we sometimes forget why. Think about a child learning thousands more words than another child, consuming twice as many stories and information texts, and having rich conversations about both this world and the many imaginary ones their favourite book characters inhabit. Think now about the impact that can have on them; their imagination… their story writing… their passions and interests.

How many would-be archaeologists never find themselves because they didn’t get to read that one magical information text about fossils and ancient civilisations?

How many nurses and doctors are hidden inside people who never got the chance to read about the human body and its mind-blowing design?

How many hidden sports people never got to express their talents because they didn’t read that biography on a famous athlete?

Everything we read has the potential to impact us. It has the power to change us and plant a seed within us that inspires and motivates us to achieve. Every character and person we read about enables us to empathise and understand others. Every fact we learn gives us hope for the future of science and technology. Every wizard and witch, hero or heroine, and adventurer or expert has the power to help us find our inner truth.

Reading is an enchantment… But… Reading will not enchant people freely. It is also a skill. It requires of us more multitasking than perhaps any other skill in the world. It relies on us to use past experience, wider knowledge, and linguistic expertise to pull apart the text and understand its true meaning. This is new to children. They are learning this very tricky skill, and for most, without our help, they will become stuck. This is where questioning comes in.

Below, I have included a fantastic tool to help us ask questions that pull apart the text and help our young readers find the answers they need to not only understand, but learn from the text. It is called the perhaps-not-so-inspiring ‘reading matrix’:

It is super simple to use, and well worth having by your side as you read with your child. Working from top to bottom, you have a range of question stems that get deeper as you progress downwards. Follow these up with the top row of words to create both shallow and deep questions. Both types of questions are very important. We check the child has understood the text on a basic level first, and then we follow through with deeper questions to pull out that understanding and create learning opportunities:

“What does the character say about his friend?” is a fantastic starting question. It has one answer.

“How could he tell his friend how he feels?” is a powerful follow up question. The first checks they read the text and absorbed what was read. The second checks they understand the text, and has the added benefit of helping the reader to understand a bit about communication and what your child expects from a conversation (making predictions!).

Let’s follow those two questions up with something even deeper: “How might the character tell his friend?” – suddenly we’ve got our young reader thinking about the character’s behaviour, how they’ve communicated in the past in the book, and making  thoughtful musings on how the character will act in the future. This is all a network of knowledge that first helps our children understand the story/text, but then also has implications for their investment in the characters and their excitement for the next chapter, next page, or next book.

The next time you read with your child, or your child reads to you, try using the matrix in this blog. Try starting with some simple questions about what you’ve read together, and then try going deeper. You may find yourself amazed at just how wonderful your child’s brain is, and how capable they are.

Gosh… this blog has gone on longer than I intended! I hope it helps you, or, at the very least, gave you some bedtime reading before those eyes draw to a close and the many books and stories of your past come to life in that dream-like imagination of yours. Perhaps our children can enjoy that too, if we enable them.