Literacy Coffee Mornings

3 times a year we run literacy coffee mornings for parents, some of the resources shared can be found below.

Supporting your child reading at home

There are many reasons why a child may have a reading age lower than their real age.  It’s important to close this gap as quickly as possible to help your child achieve their potential, and your child will receive support at school to help them.  However, putting some simple strategies in place at home will help your child to practise their skills and build their confidence much more quickly.

The most important message for you and your child to understand is that if they practise their reading, they will improve.  Just like riding a bike or learning to swim, reading is a skill which needs to be learnt and practised.  Children who enjoy reading naturally practise the skill over and over again, but children who find reading challenging often try to avoid it, meaning that they can fall behind and lose confidence.  It’s never too late to help your child to improve their skills and confidence in reading, and there are lots of ways to help your child as a family:

• Create a habit of reading aloud to an adult every day, and ask friends and family to help out so that your child associates reading with a range of adults.  Older siblings, relatives, and family friends can all make fantastic reading partners.

• Make sure that your child enjoys what they are reading.  Research shows that all readers make the most progress when they are reading something that interests them, so don’t feel that you have to force your child to finish a book if they hate it.  Help your child to seek out texts about topics which interest them, and remember that non-fiction is just as valuable as fiction.  Consider reading newspaper match reports about their favourite team, or reviews of films or video games which interest them.

• Make sure that your child can understand what they are reading. Some children are able to decode (sound out) complex words but don’t understand the meanings, leading to confusion and frustration.  Every now and then, ask your child some simple questions about what you have read so far, and help them to use a dictionary to check the meanings of new words.

• Get into the habit of putting on the subtitles when your child watches a film or TV programme.  They will soon stop noticing them, and without realising it they will be practising the skill of reading along with the story.  Seeing words written down as well as spoken aloud can also help with spelling skills. Avoid using this strategy with live programmes such as the news, as there is a delay between the speech and the subtitles.

• Let your child see you reading, and ask friends and family to do the same.  Encourage your child to get involved with all of the daily tasks which involve reading: writing and reading a shopping list, reading the instructions in a recipe, or reading the instruction manual for a new appliance or toy.

• Audiobooks can be a very useful and enjoyable way of practising reading skills.  Reading along to an audiobook will help your child to understand how a writer uses punctuation and can help with spelling, this is an option on myON students can use.  Even if this isn’t practical, such as in the car, following a story from an audiobook will help your child to practise important skills of memory and concentration, benefiting them in all subjects.  Again, make sure that you choose something that your child enjoys: David Walliams, for example, is a very entertaining reader of his own books. Building fluency in reading can also be achieved reading along with expert readers, such as siblings and other family.