Learning to Read How do children learn to read? How can we as parents support the process?

Attitudes to reading “I’ve had a hard day and now she expects me to work at this.” “This doesn’t look exciting enough to make me want to decode it.” “I wish I’d stayed at home and watched TV.” “You read it to me.”

Word recognition and graphic knowledge Grammatical knowledge Phonic knowledge (sounds and spelling) TEXT Knowledge of context Word recognition and graphic knowledge

Language comprehension processes Good Word recognition processes Poor Word recognition processes Good Language comprehension processes Poor

Phonics is not enough Once Sea/see Saw (Hence ‘tricky words’)

Reading: contextual clues The bandage was wound around the wound The wind was too strong to wind the sail I spent last evening evening out a pile of dirt The Reading Reading Centre

Backwards reading: What happens when we read? Finger pointing Hesitancy Re-reading of words Sounding out of letters Sentences not fitting onto one line – hard to follow sense from one line to another Reversal of letters/words

Stages along the way Developing listening skills Awareness of rhyme Sentence segmentation Syllable segmentation Rime and analogy Alliteration and onset Awareness of the position of vowel sounds Individual sounds (phonemes) – decoding & encoding

Pure Sounds C – a – t C – a – n – d

Phun with phonemes Segmentation: sounds in pot? Deletion: take h from hat Matching: do fan and fist start with the same sound? Counting: how many sounds in cake? Substitution: change h in hat to s Blending: put b-e-d together Rhyming: how many words rhyme with eat?

To summarise…. Share books – not just school reading books – as often as possible Play rhyming games to support phonic training/auditory awareness Ban the schwa! (www.focusonphonics.co.uk) If your child doesn’t want to read to you, read to him/her Avoid showing anxiety Talk around the text – reading for meaning Keep it fun