Support Your Child Reading
7 Top Tips to Support Reading at Home
Shared reading is a great way to develop students’ language and communication and to boost their reading skills.
1. Concentrate on reading quality (it isn’t all about reading lots!) Don’t worry too much about the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of reading each day. Books are great—but leaflets, comics, recipes and instructions on a webpage can all be great too. Following a recipe to make some cupcakes is valuable reading. Be on the lookout for reading, wherever it is.
2. Ask your child lots of questions. All reading matters. Shared reading is about ‘reading with’, not just ‘reading to’ (even for older children). So, ask lots of ‘Wh’ questions, such as Who? What? When? Where? Why? Try them when talking about books: for example, ‘what do you think Harry is feeling?
3. Ask your child to make predictions about what they have read. If it is a book, look at the front cover—or the last chapter—and talk about what might happen next. Look for clues in the book and be a reading detective! For example, ‘can you see the bear on the front cover? Where do you think he will go?’
4. Ask your child to summarise what they have read. When you’ve finished reading, talk about what happened. Acting out the things that happened in the story or describing the big idea of a chapter is really fun and maximises learning. For example, ‘can you remember all the things that happened on the bear hunt?’
5. Ask your child to write about what they have read. Write, or draw pictures, from anything you’ve read! Big writing and pictures are even more fun. For example, use an old roll of wallpaper to make a treasure map with clues from the stories you’ve read together.
6. Read and discuss reading with friends or family. Make books a part of the family. Encourage your child to share them with a relative or friend, over a video call. Laugh about them when you are making meals together. For example, ‘I hope the tiger doesn’t come to tea today!’
7. Maintain the motivation to read. Talk about the joy of reading whenever you can. Your child is on an amazing journey to becoming a reader. Put them in the driving seat and have fun on the way!
Engage Programme
Parental engagement is a vital part of your child’s learning at Parkside. At Parkside we are working hard to improve on the variety of ways in which we communicate and work with parents. In effective schools, parents are actively involved in the education of pupils and this is something that we are passionate about at Parkside. We look forward to further targeted sessions around reading over the course of this year.
