Tips for reading at home

There are so many reasons why we read and so many strategies that we use. Keep these in mind when reading with your children. They don’t need to do everything at once! It will all come in time. The most important thing though is to ensure that we all, children included, are reading for meaning – comprehension is vital!

Below are some ideas for you to use to support children in developing their reading. 

• Make predictions: read the title and look at the front cover, then make predictions of what the book will be about; stop part way through the story and predict what will happen next. You can also draw or write about your predictions. 
• Remind them to point to each word as they read. 
• Look at the picture and make a prediction – what will this page be about? Choose an important word from this prediction and see if you can find it in the text – the child doesn’t have to read the whole page if it is too much for them. 
• Celebrate their reading behaviours - following print in the right direction, using the pictures to gain meaning, etc. Tell the child that they can read, that by looking at the pictures they are already readers. 
• If the child still needs to learn some letters and sounds, find letters and sounds in the world around you - go on a letter walk, listening to sounds from words represented in the world around you, eg. b in bin. Always teach the child letters, sounds and frequently used words in context so it is meaningful. 
• Be word detectives and find out all the interesting things you can about letter/sound blends and combinations (eg sh, ch, ing, ou) and new words.  
• What was the book about? Summarise and retell. 
• Make a connection with your own life.  
• Find a word you don’t know the meaning of then work out what it could mean together. 
• What is your opinion of the book? Explain. 
• What did you learn that was new? What did you already know? 
• How did this book make you feel? What was the mood of the book?  
• What do you think would have happened next in the story if it had kept going?

Tips for writing at home and using the children’s diaries

Get the child to re-read their sentence to you. Encourage them to point to the words as they read. If they haven’t drawn the picture yet, get them to do this.

Further ideas of activities you can do include:

• write another sentence. 
• if the teacher or a family helper wrote the sentence, then at home the children could re-write the sentence. 
• practice re-writing the sentence to improve writing, ie view the first time or two as drafts and then do a good copy, working on leaving spaces, forming letters the right way around (if some were back to front initially), using capitals and lower case letters correctly etc.  
• think about other words that have similar letters and sounds. 

The readers can be stored in the boxes on the entrance table with the purple tablecloth in the morning so they are ready for our next diary writing session.  

Most importantly, have fun! Reading and writing at home should be an enjoyable time for everyone.