Engage
English
“I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.” Roald Dahl
At Melrose we love books and we aim to foster a love of stories and reading.
Along with us, you will see that spark as it ignites in your daughter, and the joy on her face as she realises she is able to read some of the notices and texts around her. “She has started to read her books to her teddies,” is a sentence we often hear from parents, joyously spoken as they realise their daughter is beginning to read!
From the early steps of being immersed in stories, girls are taught decoding through a comprehensive synthetic phonics scheme along with being helped to increase their sight vocabulary of phonetically irregular words.
Guided reading is taught throughout the school. The primary scheme in the Preparatory Department is the Oxford Reading Tree with the girls moving on to the guided reading in the Junior Department. Girls learn to read fluently and to engage with and understand the text. They also learn to analyse, evaluate and respond to texts.
