Supporting your child with reading Tuesday 22nd November 2016

Do you enjoy reading? Does your child ever see you read? Do you read to your child?

What Is more important? The pictures or the words? The first books a child learns to enjoy are picture books – they help children develop understanding of story content, a child can learn about characters and settings through the pictures and this in turn helps give meaning to the text. Once a child starts to decode the words on the page, pictures remain as a strategy to help them with their decoding of unfamiliar words. It is important to allow children to use pictures to help them with their reading as they can give further clues about what is going on in the text.

How can you help your child with their reading? Take your time talking about a book before getting your child to read. Look at the front cover – what does it tell you about the story? What is the book called? Who could be in the story? Can you think of another book that is like this one? Have you read any other books by the same author? Read the blurb on the back of the book – does this give us further information about the book? Give your child time to look around the page of a book before launching into reading, let them familiarise themselves with pictures and the text, scanning across for words that they recognise.

How can you help your child with their reading? Encourage and support your child with the reading of the text – remind them of the different strategies they can use *look at the pictures *sound out words using grapheme/phoneme correspondence (what sounds the written letters make) *break larger words into smaller ‘chunks’ *look for smaller words within a larger word *miss out a tricky word, read on and then come back to it If these strategies don’t work, then tell them the word and move on.

How can you help your child with their reading? Colour band books: each colour covers a wide range, and there is often an overlap between them. Sometimes the colours can place a barrier to a child’s enjoyment of reading as it becomes a competition for them to move ‘up’ a band and often before they are ready. A child should be reading a text at 95% accuracy – this means that they read 95+ words with fluency, no hesitation or sounding out of a word. As a quick test for this – get them to hold up 5 fingers while they are reading. If they stop at a word, sound it out or mis-read it then they put down a finger. If they have put down all five fingers within the first 100 words or so, then that text is too difficult for them and they should be reading a lower level text. Allow them to re-read familiar texts, this helps them gain confidence and enjoyment from reading.