Maritime Academy Trust

Maritime is a charitable education trust with schools across London and the South East.

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Helping Your Child at Home

Helping your child at home can have a huge impact on your child’s ability to understand, retain and develop their learning at school. We believe that parents and carers must foster their child’s love of learning by regularly listening to their children reading aloud and by checking in with what their children are learning at school on a daily basis. 

Supporting Reading

Research has shown that regularly reading with your children has a huge positive impact on their ability to be successful learners, their attainment in school and even on their future life chances. At Brooklands, we know how vital this is and wish for all of our children to be given this significant boost through daily reading at home.

There are so many benefits to reading with your child:

  • it develops a love of reading
  • it increases children's vocabulary
  • it exposes children to different contexts
  • it develops their understanding
  • it helps their reading

Support can be given in two ways: informal support and formal support. Both have been shown to be equally valuable and both should be part of daily reading with children of every age:

Informal support

  • Reading every day
  • Talking about books
  • Telling stories
  • Playing games based on books
  • Showing that you read

Formal support

  • Practising recall of the letters and sounds
  • Practising recognising ‘tricky’ words
  • Practising hearing sounds in words (segmenting)
  • Practising putting sounds together to make word (blending)
  • Getting children to read

Phonics

We follow the 'Letters and Sounds' program from Nursery through to Year 1 which was published by the Government in 2007. It teaches children the initial sounds that letters make before introducing alternative spellings as well as pairs or groups of letters that make sounds.