Reading at home and at school

All children need to learn to read, and all parents want their children to be able to read and write. The most important thing is that children learn better when they enjoy reading.

By enjoying books together and sharing a love of stories from the earliest age, you are helping your child develop – and learning to read is fun!

Your child will gain a lot from spending time with you talking and listening, reading and writing. Most children will try hard to please you and will want to do well. Best of all, sharing the fun of reading is a great experience for children and adults.

First Steps

• Children often want to listen to the same story again and again. This is fine, as it builds confidence and familiarity with words, and reinforces that stories are fun.
• Try to share books together each day, and not just at bedtime. A few minutes of special, quiet time with a book every day is much more valuable than half an hour a week.
• One of the main ways in which you can help children to become readers is by sharing books and reading aloud to them. They will learn to talk about the story and pictures, join in the parts they know and eventually recognise the words on the page.

Most children learn to read by putting letters together that match up with the sounds that they remember hearing. They learn the sounds that letters make. They learn how letters join together to make words.

You can use the words you see every day to help your child learn. One of the best ways to do this is by looking at pictures of what the word means – or at the real thing.

Beginner readers also learn that print on the page actually means something. Words name things, they tell us stories or give us information.

Ask your child’s teachers for advice and ideas about how you can help with reading and writing.

You can help by doing the following:

• Singing. Rhymes help children see how letters make the same pattern in different words. Play ‘odd one out games’. For example, which word is the odd one in a list like cat, mat, dog, sat?
• Play ‘I-spy’. It is a great way  of showing that every word begins with a letter.
• At the shops, point out the names of different kinds of food as you go past them (for example, apples, bacon, and cheese).
• Encourage your child to choose a book for you to read to them.
• Show your child the way words go from left to right on the page by underlining them with fingers – yours first, then theirs!
• Don’t keep them guessing for a long time if they can’t say a new word – help them spell it out slowly using the sounds of the letters an then say it faster together.
• Praise your child when they work out a new word for themselves, or when they go back and put right a word they got wrong the first time

The next step

Between the ages of four and seven, most children learn to read, but even when they can read, you should still try to read to them as often as possible. Sharing stories with a grown-up will teach them new words and will encourage them to become better readers.

Children develop their reading skills in different ways. Some may want to get every word exactly right while other children will race to the end of a story. Other children may read hesitantly. Try to respond to your child’s needs and let them read at their own pace.

Eventually, you will know in which ways your child needs more help. Some children may need to slow down and look more carefully at each word. Others will need to move the story along and not worry so much about their mistakes.

If problems arise, encourage them to use all the available information and everything they know to make a guess. They should look at the pictures and remember what has happened in the story. Their ability to predict and guess accurately will gradually improve.

Getting better

As we have said, part of learning to be a better reader is being able to guess what new words mean and how they sound. There are many ways in which you can continue to play a very important role in the development of your child’s reading.

You can help by doing the following:

• Find books about something you know they like – maybe animals, or how other people live, or outer space.
• Read a story together, then read it out again, missing out words. Get your child to fill in the blanks. A different word that they already know the biggest part of words like play-ing, eat-en, walk-ed by breaking the word down. If they read or write out the part they know, you can finish it letter by letter.
• Help with long words by clapping along together or counting out the different chunks of the word (for example, three for tram-po-line, four for all-i-ga-tor). Write out long words and cut them into bite-sized pieces. Get your child to put the pieces back together the right way round.

When your reads and gets a word wrong, let them finish the line before you put them right. Children often realize what the word should be, go back and correct themselves. If your child doesn’t know a word in a sentence, get them to say ‘something’ instead. They can often work it out from other words around it.

Learning to write

Children are often eager to write. Writing often follows on from drawing and from the child’s reading. Children like to be able to write their names, to label drawings or to write a store to go with a picture.

They learn about reading through their writing, having to think about the sound and how words look. When they see that writing is a way of telling someone something, just like talking, they usually  want to try it for themselves.

You can help them by doing the following:

• Get your children used to making the shapes of letters by joining dots or using a pen to go over shapes you’ve drawn in pencil.
• At the beginning, don’t worry too much about untidy writing. You don’t want to put them off having fun when they’re learning.
• Don’t worry if your child crosses words out when they’re writing. Lots of children try out different spellings until they feel a word looks right. Get them to try out words on scrap paper, then put the word in its proper place when they are happy with it.
• Write a story that your child has told you. They can learn from watching you write and can help by suggesting letters and spelling.
• Help them to make their own labels, notices, cards and books.
• If they want to write a story, help them to think of what it’s about, what happens and how it ends. Ask questions about the characters in the story.  You (or they) could write down some notes to help them remember all their ideas.
• Explain that they need different words to write about the past (we walked to the shops yesterday), present (today I am here) and future (tomorrow I will go swimming).
• Use lower case rather than capitals. Children find it easier to practice the patterns of the letters that way.

Spelling

Lots of children find spelling hard. If it gets in the way of your child’s enjoyment of reading and writing, there are ways you can help using everyday items.

At Infant and Junior School we use a “look, say, cover, write, check” system for learning spelling.

You can help them by doing the following:

• Spell out words with fridge magnets, or letter tiles from word games. Take some letters out and get your child to put the right ones back in the right places.
• Play games with lists of words. Can they put them in alphabetical order using the first letter of a word (for example, cat, fat, hat, mat and sat)? or can they do this by the second letter (for example, bag, bed, big, bog and bug)?
• Give them old newspapers or magazines to play word-finding games – for example, get them to highlight or draw a circle round every word that ends with ‘ing’, or every word beginning with ‘t’. think up harder versions as your child learns more!
• Draw or cut out pictures of things that have only one letter different (like ‘pen’ and ‘pin’) to help them get used to how different vowels (a, e, i, o, u) work.
• Use a mirror so your child can see how their mouth moves when saying letters that can easily get mixed up when they write them down, like ‘m’ and ’w’, or ‘p’ and ‘g’
• Make up games to help your child see the difference between words like ‘tap’ and ‘tape or ‘hop’ and ‘hope’ where the last letter changes the way you say the whole word.
• Get them to play at rearranging letters to make other words (anagrams) out of their name, or other words they know.

Dictionaries

Practice looking up words together and sharing the dictionary. Children need help in looking up words, following alphabetical order and guessing how a word may start.

There are many good dictionaries written specially for children.

You can help by doing the following:

• Whenever you’re reading together, make sure your child feels OK and is comfortable.
• Use books with pictures, and later, with pictures and words. Picture books help children match the pictures to the words. Don’t cover up the pictures to make your child ‘’read properly’.
• Write titles under pictures (for example, dog, mummy, house) to show them that words belong to things. You can also stick labels on things at home – or when they’re older get them to do it themselves (for example, door, cup). Start with simple words.