Supporting children as readers

Supporting children as readers – How to create a need to read

If you want to help your children learn to read, there are many ways to do this. As always, I’ve put a lot of emphasis on inspiring and motivating before worrying about the specific skills and knowledge needed. Children are geniuses, and will find their own method if they want it enough.

Readers face two major obstacles, decoding (what the letters and words say) and comprehension (of what it all means). In primary schools, decoding is taught through phonics as a tool that leads to the ultimate goal of comprehension. We could get through a book by looking at every word, but if we didn’t understand what the meaning was, there’d be no point. So this is the first lesson: reading has a purpose.

This purpose is very useful in so many situations everyday. Language floods the landscape of a child’s life. Aside from the stories you read to them, there are the newspapers and websites that other people read, as well the text in their favourite programmes, and on a trip to the shops. You could show how recognising words is useful to accomplishing tasks (‘we need to find the part of the shop that says “milk”’). By drawing attention to the real-life reading opportunities, you will increase the child’s drive to understand what it all means. Lesson two: create the need to read, and children will work hard to figure out how it can be done.

To support this process, show that you have confidence that they will learn to read eventually. Some will learn much later than others, but it is inevitable. Be encouraging and focus on the positives. Until they are told that something is ‘impossible’, they will keep trying.  You can understand this if you ever tried to swing so high that you could touch the sky. Lesson three: never give up.

One of the first things to learn about reading is that it is replicable. The words in a book are still the same each day, regardless of who reads them. Rereading your favourite stories is one of the best things you can do. At first read it aloud, then show the words to your child as you read it. They’ll want to join in with memorable phrases if they enjoy it enough, so encourage them to use the words to help them. As they progress as readers, they’ll become less dependent on you and may end up telling you stories each night. Lesson four: revisit the classics.

From the age of 4, children are taught the conventions of the English language at school. English is a very complex language so no wonder it takes a while. Many of the most common words in English cannot be sounded out in phonics (e.g., once, sure) and need to be recognised on sight. You can practise these using sound cards (there up to three hundred available to download here: http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/cll/lettersandsounds/hfwords.html and here: http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/cll/lettersandsounds/200.html). Lesson five: build up your child’s sight vocabulary.

There are other tools that readers use to help them achieve understanding. Besides having a good sight vocabulary, reading is supported through knowledge of how sentences are constructed. Knowing concepts like action words (verbs) and describing words (adjectives) can provide clues to what a word means. Additionally, there are many clues on each page that give away the meaning of the words. In picture books (speak to a teacher if you’d like some recommendations), the decoding of an unrecognised word (e.g. basket) might be supported by the illustrator. The broader context of a text gives the child some expectations about what kind of words will be in it. If it’s a traditional folktale, there might be witches and princes. If it’s a book about wildlife, there might be some science vocabulary. Experienced readers use all these strategies to understand the books we read. Lesson six (the final one): there are some other useful strategies apart from phonics.

So, create a need to read that helps to endure the amounts of concentration and persistence it takes to decipher words on the page and correct mistakes. There will be a lot of mistakes. Accept them as a progressive part of being a learner. Currently, decoding (phonics) is taught in schools as the most useful tool in reading, but there are others that experienced readers use. It’s important not to forget that reading is fundamentally about understanding the written word.