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Reading at home

Introducing the book
When asking your child to read please introduce the book first, discussing the title, what it means and what they think the book may be about from the title and cover. This is a key skill that children need to develop from an early age so that they are in a secure position to extend their comprehension skills even further as they move towards the end of Key Stage 1.  

Reading Strategies
When reading there are a number of clues that your child can use to work out words they are struggling with:

  1. Use the story e.g. a story about a new pet may have the word dog in it
  2. Use the picture (looking at the page for clues e.g. c   could be cat if there is a picture of a cat).
  3. Sounding out e.g. splitting a word into sounds e.g. c-a-t blends to read cat.
  4. Recognise smaller words in bigger words (e.g. splitting playing into play-ing.)
  5. Find the word somewhere else in the story (point out if they have already read it on an earlier page)
  6. Return to the beginning of the sentence and try again (to recapture the flow of the story).

Don’t focus too heavily on mistakes, only correct if it is necessary so as not to stop the flow of reading. Give lots of praise and be specific with it - e.g. I like how you looked at the picture then to help yourself, I liked how you split that word up to read it etc.

After reading
Discuss the book with your child, did they enjoy it and why. Talk about the characters and what they did in the story. Then ask questions about specific pages e.g. Can you tell me what they played on at the park? Can you point to the full stop on page 2? Can you point to the word ‘said’ or ‘you’ on page 3 etc. These types of questions encourage children to develop their early comprehension skills, using evidence from the text to support their opinions.