Helping your child for parents with children who have a
Special Educational Need or Disability (SEND).
Reading– Children who read, learn!
To help your child with reading it is important to read a little each day. It is important that this is done every day as the practise that the children get needs to be consistent.
Most children will remember their phonic sounds and the children are used to building up the words using these blocks of sound. We call it ‘Fred Talk’.
For example the word three could be blocked into /th//r//ee. It is also important that they blend the word back together and say ‘three’ as a whole fluent word. Coming back to the word to check they have remembered it will also really help.
Some children like an adult to model the reading first. For example, If you read the sentence for them first then ask them to read it again. You can go through the passage you are reading sentence by sentence like this. Once the children have increased in confidence, you can increase to more sentences or whole pages in this way. It really works!
Writing- In school, we need children to be able to use the basics of writing at all times. By this we mean using capitals and full stops in all sentences.
Children who read regularly are the ones who pick up the basics of writing the fastest.
When reading spend a minute or two looking at the capitals and the full stops. This could also be a game where the children clap at each capital and stamp their feet at each full stop (classroom tried and tested and loved by teachers all over the globe!)
You can add other actions for other punctuation this way.
Handwriting– If your child is struggling with this it can often be a muscle weakness. One of the best ways to improve this is to get your child colouring in. You can use coloured pens but pencils are best- as always, a little but often is best.
Another great way to improve children’s fine motor skills is playing games with lego, craft activities, cutting out and many other games that get your children using their fingers, wrists, and arms.
Spelling- We are having a big push on spellings in school as we feel spelling is an important life skill. It is a memory skill and this is often where children can have the struggle.
To help your child, it is important that you learn your child’s spellings at home each week. There are many ways to support this, but little and often is best. Work on one or two words at a time. You can ask the children to memorise the letters (sometimes called sounds) and then test them at home. You can break the words down into chunks of the word, for example understanding can be chunked into under stand ing.
Using a silly saying really helps- because can be Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants. The children love to make up their own!
We have many more ways to support children with spelling so please get in touch if you need more support.
Speaking– children’s speech has so much influence on their writing and understanding so we feel it is important for the adults around them to be their biggest influencers! Make sure you give your children the chance to speak, in full sentences and avoiding grammar errors, where possible.
Try not to let your child speak in baby-talk and insist on naming items properly, for example, train not choo-choo.
If your child is young and has a dummy, don’t let them speak with this in their mouths. Speaking habits are picked up fast and from a young age and dummy-talk is a big problem!
Making sure children are used to chewing their food (and not having pureed foods for too long during their development) is another good way to improve speech.
Good speaking follows good listening- give your child plenty of opportunities to stop and tell you what they can hear. This could be on your walk to school or whilst playing outside, maybe you can turn it into a game like I-spy -but instead you can play I-hear something beginning with….
Maths this subject needs confidence by the bucketful, but what if your child isn’t so confident?
As with the reading, lots and lots of practise helps.
When practising adding, find some everyday objects (like pasta shapes) and put them into small groups-ask your child to add them together and they can check this by counting. This method can be used for subtraction, multiplying and dividing, too. Perhaps each piece of pasta could represent 10 or 100 or 1000.
Using Times Tables Rockstars often also helps your child to gain confidence in using their times tables facts for calculations.
Emotions– We often find that our children are unable to name their emotions which can mean that they are unable to express to us how they are feeling. When we know how they feel we can support them to understand why they may feel this way and that it is perfectly normal to feel a whole range of emotions.
Please note that the above ideas are a small snapshot of what we know works for children. We have many more ideas and we are more than happy to discuss any concerns you may have. If you feel your child may have a SEND need, please contact the school office on 01914201710.
You should make an appointment with your class teacher to discuss any worries, and Mrs Ali, the school SENDCo is happy to give advice.
Medical concerns can be discussed with the school nursing team. Please see the web link below.
You may also find the below websites useful for more information:
https://sendlocaloffer.southtyneside.gov.uk/