Parents’ perceptions, values, attitudes, and expectations play an important role in influencing their children’s attitudes toward reading, and subsequent literacy development. When children share a book with someone who makes them feel special, the attitude that reading is pleasurable is transferred to other reading encounters.

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As a parent, you can:

• Provide a good role model — read yourself and read often to your child.

• Provide varied reading material — some for reading enjoyment and some with information about hobbies and interests.

• Ask your child what subjects they would like to read about.

• Encourage activities that require reading — for example, cooking (reading a recipe), baking a cake or making a meal (reading instructions and directions), or identifying an interesting sea creature or shell seen at the beach (using a reference book).

• Establish a reading time, even if it is only ten minutes a day.

• If reading together is traumatic in your house, do it in a café, or under a tree - somewhere your child is comfortable.

• Write notes to your school-age child; encourage written responses.

• Make the most of emails and the internet, which also require reading and writing.

• Ask your child to bring a library book home to read to a younger sibling (if they have one).

• Establish one evening a week for reading (instead of television viewing or browsing the internet or playing video games).

• Take time to play word games such as Scrabble or Pictionary.

• Irrespective of a child's age, read to them regularly.

• Encourage your child in all reading efforts by praising the reading, not the reader – say things such as, "I liked how you read on to find more information."

• Celebrate their successes.

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During reading, use these reading strategies:

• Before reading aloud, orient your child to the text by talking about it beforehand.

• • Look at unfamiliar words, for example.

  • Describe what the book is about by reading the blurb on the back, for example.

• Encourage your child to predict what a word could be based on the meaning.

• Try ‘echo reading'.

  • Depending on the text, read a sentence, paragraph or page aloud first, and then get your child to read it.

• Try ‘shared reading'.

  • Take turns reading sentences or paragraphs.

  • You read the first sentence and your child the next.

• Read aloud and encourage your child to mimic you by following along behind you.

  • Trace your finger under the words in a fluent way to show where you are reading.

  • Avoid reading word by word.

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