Guidance for Reading with your Child

Reading is a central part of every pupil’s life at Kerem and sits at the heart of our curriculum. Our aim is to foster a genuine love of reading in each child so that books and stories become an integral part of their life. Listening to your child practise their reading at home is one of the most valuable and effective ways you can support your child’s academic attainment in all subjects. Therefore, your child’s reading practise should take place in an environment with minimal distractions and at an optimal time in the afternoon (please note that reading practise should ideally not take place just before a child’s bedtime, although, of course, that is a wonderful time for them to listen to a story beyond their ability being read to them by an adult).  

When listening to your child read, they will be developing two important skills in conjunction with each other: decoding (the ability to identify the sounds in a word and blend them in order to read the whole word) and comprehension (understanding by taking meaning from a text). 

How to support your child’s decoding skills

Here is a video modeling how to ‘sound talk’ and blend words together. 

How to support your child’s comprehension skills

In the case of early readers, it can be common for an adult’s main focus to be on their word recognition, as this can take a lot of effort from the child. The temptation can be to move on to the next page without checking to see if they have understood the sentences they have just read. For this reason, children are encouraged to read each sentence at least twice in a row before moving on. The first time, they will mainly be focusing on reading the words out, and the second time they should be able to read more fluently and take meaning from the words as they read them. Please note that for children in Reception, an adult can model the second, more fluent reading of the sentence in order to introduce this concept and take into account that they will have a lower stamina for reading. 

Another key way you can support your child’s comprehension skills is to ask quick and simple questions at regular intervals throughout the book. Here are some examples of questions you could ask: