It’s true: home readers are important!
You are your child’s first teacher and you teach them many important skills, including how to speak, daily operations, interpretation …… the list is endless. But your job doesn’t stop when your children go to school. It is a well known fact that children experience the most success when school and home work together in partnership.
Your children learn about the importance of reading in the home. If they view family members using reading and writing for everyday purposes, it cements the importance into their developing mind. Reading for pleasure, sharing a story with your child, using a recipe and reading street signs teaches them that reading is a necessary skill in todays world.
Reading with your child at home will help your child in all areas of school. Research shows the importance of reading on a daily basis in developing their use and understanding of vocabulary.
An instrumental piece of research was conducted by Anderson R, Wilson P & Fielding L and published in Reading Research Quarterly Vol 3 in 1988. This exploration into the “Growth in reading and how children spend their time outside of school” uncovered the importance of supporting your school aged child’s reading at home. This ground breaking research is still relevant today in setting guidelines and curriculum outcome. If you are interested in reading the whole report it can be found here.
Here are some strategies that you can make use of when reading with your child at home:
- Pre-reading strategies – look at the title and pictures with your child and discuss what you see and hypothesis the outcome. Prompt them to share their view and what they think the story may be about?
- Question, question, question: Stop reading at regular intervals and ask your child questions about
what has been read so far and what they think may happen next in the text. By doing this you are giving them a break to process what they have read, this helps with comprehension. - Help your child to stretch out unfamiliar words and chunking sounds together and see if they can make sense of the difficult or unfamiliar words. Just be aware that the English language is quiet convoluted and not every word can be sounded out, some you will just have to tell them and it will become recognisable as a sight word.
Other strategies for helping decipher a word is :
- Context clues: Based on the surrounding text and what had happened previously in the story,
encourage your child to guess what they think the word may be. - Help from pictures: Encourage your child to take notice of the pictures as they may help them to
identify an unknown word. Don’t cover up pictures as they read.
Punctuation:
You may need to explain to your older child what the various punctuation marks mean
so that he/she is able to pause, stop and use appropriate reading strategies at the right time.
Punctuation includes the full stop (.), the comma (,), the question mark (?), the exclamation mark (!),
apostrophes (’) and inverted commas (“ ”).
Western Downs Libraries are here to support you through the life of educating your child. As you already know, we have a large array of picture books for pre-school kids, but have you checked out our huge selection of home readers you can borrow to either supplement the school home readers, or to make use of in school holidays and term breaks.
Our home readers are very family friendly and come with information for parents. In the front of the book you will find a helpful key, which informs you of the word count, any high frequency words, content words, comprehension focus and the theme. There are a wide selection of themes and all 9 Western Downs Libraries have home readers.