The Woodland Show Reading guide

Phonics focus

Lessons 93–94: suffixes -ful and -less; -ness and -ment

Practise -ful, -less, -ness and -ment in these words: colourful, helpful, careful, peaceful; hopeless; sadness, grumpiness, kindness; excitement, improvement, disappointment. Read practice words in their meaningful parts and compare related forms. Use the programme lessons to introduce new sounds; the story is original.

Bold red vowel letters and bold blue consonant letters show the selected focus spellings. Read selected prefixes, suffixes, changed letters and review spellings in context. Vowel y is red. Apostrophes and punctuation remain dark. Discuss how meaningful word parts change meaning and spelling. Colour is a visual aid, and every letter in a spelling does not represent a separate sound. Read the guide note for each pattern. Help children with other letters and patterns in the word when needed. A highlighted letter does not mean the whole word is independently decodable.

Adult supported words

An adult reads the title with the child. Preview Lucy, Ben, plan, woodland, puppet, show, hang, cloth, between, two, low, posts, Gran, puts, blanket, grass, Everyone, waits, knot, slips, falls, down, looks, their, broken, stage, now, feels, little, too, make, idea, Let’s, use, that, branch, carries, makes, each, end, checks, holds, still, time, stays, Their, begins, fade, Ben’s, giant, sandwich, Lucy’s, offers, tiny, leaf, That, very, small, lunch, friends, laugh, its, finish, bow, again, thanks, sharing, was, better, than. Help with unfamiliar parts of focus words too. These are supported shared-reading narratives; not every word is independently decodable.

Before reading

Read three practice words and name the selected spelling. Look at the cover, name the setting and predict what might happen.

During reading

Read each sentence aloud together. Point to the highlighted letters, blend the focus words and reread naturally. Use Talk Together to discuss the character, problem, actions and ending.

Narrative structure

A fallen cloth threatens a woodland puppet show. Lucy, Ben and Gran repair the stage and make their friends laugh with a tiny leaf lunch.

After reading

Invite the child to retell what happened first, what went wrong, what the character tried and how the story ended. Reread the book to build confidence.

Compare meaning: help/helpful, hope/hopeless, sad/sadness, kind/kindness, improve/improvement, excite/excitement. Final e is kept before -ment in excitement and improvement; grumpy changes y to i in grumpiness. -ful has one l. Only the suffix letters are selected.