Kerr Mackie Primary School

Supporting Reading at Home

Reading together at home is one of the easiest but most important ways in which you can help your child. As you share books you are helping improve your child’s reading skills and also showing them how important and enjoyable reading is.

In terms of reading, we want children to be able to:

• Enjoy reading and see it as a pleasurable leisure activity, as well as a means of following instructions and finding things out;
• Have the reading skills necessary to read a range of text types for pleasure and for information;
• To be confident and competent readers, children need to have access to a range of reading experiences. 

 
In Early Years and Key Stage One, we teach reading by following the Floppy Phonics Scheme. Click here to open or download more information about this and found out how you can use it to support your child's reading.

Websites to help the development of Reading at home and School:

Top Tips for Reading at Home:

• Keep sessions short
• Keep sessions relaxed – find a comfortable place where you and your child can settle down
• Give lots of praise, progress may not always be fast – children do not always find the skill of reading and understanding easy to grasp
• Talk about the book before you begin to read – look at the front cover, and the pictures (if any) and ask your child to think about or even guess what the book may be about.
• Ask questions to check your child’s understanding e.g. What might happen next? Why did something happen?
• Talk about the book afterwards – did your child enjoy it? Why? What was the best bit?
• If your child struggles over a particular word, try to find ways to help them remember it e.g. by looking at the ‘shape’ of the word, or by guessing the word from the meaning of the sentence.
• Don’t give up on the bedtime story, even if your child is a good reader. The more stories and books your child hears, the more they will want to read.
• Be a good model for your children – let them see you reading – anything and everything – newspapers, magazines, catalogues, books etc. – let them know that reading is a valuable skill.
• Telling them about a book or story you liked when you were a child. You may still be able to find a copy of it on the internet!
• Making up a story or telling them about when you were a child or something that happened to you at school, remember you don’t always need a book to tell a good story.
• Taking it in turns to read parts of the story.
• Telling them one thing you really enjoy about listening to them read.

Helpful questions to ask children when reading:

Children’s understanding of what they have read is the key to success and enjoyment of reading. It allows children to challenge ideas, collect a wider range of vocabulary and become creative writers as they use the language they have acquired to improve their writing. Below are grouped questions under different themes that you may ask your child after they have read. They are some basic question starters that will give you a starting point for the type of questions to ask your child about the book they are reading.