How you can help at home

Reading regularly is vital in helping children become confident readers and we recommend reading stories each night to your child and practicing their reading books at least four times a week.

Below are some things you can do while reading with your child:

• What is happening?
• Take time to talk about what is happening in the pictures before you read the text. What can you see?
• Discuss the meaning of words.
• Make predictions. What do you think will happen next? What makes you think that?
• Discuss feelings. How do you think the character is feeling? Why?
• Use lots of expression when reading especially for the voices of different characters.
• Point to the words on the page when reading them.
• Can the children use the pictures to guess the word, looking at the initial sound?
•  Describe the characters in the story.

How you could help at home

• Try to say the short sound of the letter, not the letter name. This will help children when they come to blend words together. E.g. the letter names dee-oh-gee don’t blend together to make ‘dog’.
• Read regularly with your child – Encourage children to recognise sounds and as they grow more confident, encourage them to blend the sounds together and to read sentences independently.
• When you are reading to your child, emphasise the rhyming words and ask what is special about them.
• Initial letter sound hunt – Say a sound to your child and see if they can find something in their house that starts with that letter. This also works well with ‘I spy’ but remember to use the letter sound and not its name.
• Songs – Sing nursery rhymes and traditional songs with your child and talk to them about the patterns that they notice in the words.