How can I help my child with reading?
Reading
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.
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.
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.
-
1. Lowe, K. (2017) Parents’ guide to helping children with reading and writing at home. Primary English Teaching Association Australia. https://petaa.edu.au/w/Teaching_Resources/Parents_guide.aspx
2. Excerpted from: Swanson, B. B. (2001). How Can I Improve My Child's Reading? Parent Brochure. ACCESS ERIC. https://www.readingrockets.org/article/how-can-i-improve-my-childs-reading
3. NSW Department of Education (2020) What to do if your child is struggling to read or write. NSW Department of Education. https://education.nsw.gov.au/parents-and-carers/learning/english/when-older-kids-struggle