Supporting your child with reading at home: some tips.

 

Once your child has mastered a small number of letters and sounds, they will start to bring home a reading book each week. To follow up on our recent Literacy workshop, here are some tips that may help you to get the most out of reading at home with your child

Some general tips.

Little and often is best. In Autahi, just five or ten minutes of reading a day at home can make a big difference. Your child will only bring a book home when they have worked on it at school and are familiar with it. Reading at home is a time to practise the skills they are acquiring, and also to share and celebrate their learning.

Plenty of praise and encouragement is a vital part of supporting your child’s reading journey. Learning to read is complex and challenging. Praise their effort and all reading attempts.

It’s worth experimenting to find the best time of day to read together. Bedtime is a perfect time to read to your child, but may not be the best time to ask your child to read to you. Some families find that breakfast time, when they’re feeling fresh, works for them. 

And, if your child is too tired to read, it’s fine to read to them.

How our reading books work.

In English, individual phonemes (sounds) are mapped onto letters and letter combinations (graphemes). Your child is learning how to read words by recognising letters and letter combinations (for example, th, sh and ch). When reading a new word, they say the sounds they recognise (‘sounding out’) then blend them together to say the word (‘m-o-p, mop’).

Each of our reading books is designed to give your child the chance to practise particular phonemes. As your child is introduced to more phonemes, these will start to appear in the reading books they bring home. This strengths-based approach sets your child up for success by only asking them to decode letter-sound combinations that they know.

Check the back page of the book to find out more about the focus sounds. The books contain occasional high frequency words that your child cannot decode yet (e.g. me, my, the and to). The reading notes list these as ‘words to tell’ and it’s fine just to give the word and let your child move onto the words they can decode.

These phrases might come in useful as you coach your child through their reading book.

Praise

Great sounding out!

Good job. I can hear you saying all the sounds in the word.

Great blending!

I can see you are using your Perseverance to keep trying. Well done.

Supporting skill development

That doesn’t sound quite right to me. Can you give it another go? (To encourage rereading and self-correction.) 

You said all the sounds. Now, blend them together to say the word. (If sounding out, but not blending.)

What sound does this letter/digraph make? (Give the sound if they’re unsure.)

Last but definitely not least …

If this all sounds like a lot, keep in mind that any reading that you do with your child is helping them to become a reader and discover a love of books and stories.

And please chat with Beth and Carl about reading at home. We are always keen to know how it’s going and share ideas.