New: Reading Diaries

Now available in English only.

Our diaries are designed to improve your home/school links by offering parents clear, simple advice on how to support their children’s reading at home.

As well as advice on asking questions, the diary’s unique four-star feedback system helps parents to decide how well their child talked about a book, understood the ideas in it, and read the text aloud.

The diaries are also available in seven community languages – Arabic, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian and Somali. For more information on these bilingual resources, please click here.

The diaries give clear guidance to parents on how to read with their children by:

• Exploring different text types through layout and language
• Suggesting what questions to ask for different text types
• Encouraging pupils to re-tell stories or recount information as well as simply reading the text

Each diary has a unique, star-rating system to help parents’ feedback more detail on their child’s reading by:

• Avoiding the need to write generalised comments
• Encouraging children to get involved to decide how well they interacted with the book and how they can improve their reading
• Enabling parents and children to see that learning to read involves many skills other than just decoding a text

The diaries also:

• Encourage greater communication between home and school with frequent comments pages where teachers and parents can exchange thoughts and ideas
• Contain a list of the first 100 words so that parents know what tricky words they need to help their children recognise and learn
• Have book review pages where children can write about a book they have read with their parents, or draw a picture to represent how they felt about the text