How can I help at home with reading?

How can I help my reader at home?

Before reading

Predict - Before beginning the story, look at the front cover. Ask your learner what they think the story might be about? How do they know that?  What connections can be made? Get your learner to think about things they have experienced, things they have seen or heard.

Questioning and Comparing - compare your predictions with each other? Feel free to challenge your learner. Throughout your story check your predictions, do you think it happened? What has changed in your thinking? Can you show me evidence of where this happened?

During reading

Questioning - Ask your learner questions throughout the story, challenge their thoughts. Ask them to show you evidence.

Compare - throughout the story can you compare what you thought at the beginning of the story to the middle and end of the story. Did you know that would happen? How? Why? What connections can you make? What evidence is there?

Strategies - Read on and read back to make sense of the text

Chunking - what blends and digraphs do you see in the text, is there a suffix like ed, s, ing, tion?

Stretch the word out to hear all the different sounds

Is your mouth ready to start the word? What sound is at the beginning?

Is this a plural? How do you know?Is there a prefix?

After  reading

Summarise Can your learner retell the book in sequence? What details are they able to add?

Questioning  When thinking about questions you can ask, think about questions where the answer is directly in the story E.g  Where were the children playing?

Also ask questions where the answer may not be in the text and learners have ti activate prior knowledge and look at the picture to make connections to figure out the answer. It doesn’t matter how far fetched the connection might be, as long as your learner can see a connection and the answer is right. Talking about how they made that connection is useful because then you are able to see the weird and wacky way they got there.

Extra tips for reading

High frequency words - Ask your learner if they can find any of their list words in their story - make it a competition “who can find the most” children thrive on the competitiveness.