Reading at Home

Your child will come home with a reading book that is changed weekly. Your child should already have some confidence in reading their book at home as they have been busy practising it for one week at school.

To help support your child’s reading progress, we kindly ask that you read with your child every day to build a strong, positive reading habit. Research, including the work of Professor Teresa Cremin, highlights that daily reading fosters a love of books, develops language and comprehension skills, and strengthens children’s confidence as readers.

Reading every day doesn’t just help your child make progress in school — it builds the strong foundations needed for success later in life. Regular reading improves vocabulary, imagination, and critical thinking skills, all of which support future learning and even career opportunities. Just 10 minutes of shared reading a day can help your child develop into a confident, enthusiastic, and skilled reader, setting them up for a lifelong love of reading and learning.

Boom Reader

We would love to hear how your child is getting on with their reading when at home. We use an online reading diary called 'Boom Reader'. This allows us to have a shared space, between school and home, that shows how your child is progressing with their reading. You can add comments, page numbers and any words they may stumble on. 

The positives of having an online reading diary are:

If you need further support on how to use Boom Reader, please watch the following video: 

If you need help on how to access Boom Reader, please dojo your child's class teacher or Mrs Grey (Our Reading Champion). 

 

Spelling

At FHAL, we want every child to feel confident and positive about spelling. Research shows that traditional weekly, high-stakes spelling tests can create unnecessary stress and don’t always help children retain what they’ve learnt. 

Instead, we now use low-stakes, supportive spelling checks. These focus on the smaller parts of words and allow children to learn as they go, building confidence and a stronger understanding of spelling patterns.

This approach keeps learning calm, encouraging, and more effective — helping children remember and apply their spelling skills over time.

Instead of sending home weekly spelling lists, we would appreciate your support in helping your child understand and explore the new words they will be learning in their English lessons.

Every 2–3 weeks, at the start of each new writing unit, your child’s class teacher will share a word list on the Dojo class page. We kindly ask that you take some time to talk about these words together — saying them out loud, looking at how they are spelt, and discussing what they mean and how they can be used.

This simple support at home will give your child a head start and help them feel more confident when these words come up in their English lessons.

An example of what the word lists will look like: