Be honest, have you ever found yourself groaning at the sight of reading homework? Reading together doesn’t only have to be about ‘decoding’ the sounds and letters. Whilst this is an important part of your child learning to read, and requires a fair bit of patience, books don’t need to feel like hard work!

The most important thing that you can do for your children is make them feel positive about books. The more fun they have, the more they want to read. The more they read, the more their vocabulary expands, their imagination runs riot and their comprehension gets better.

There are lots of different things you can do together to make books fun. Why not try some of these:

* Let your child join in with key words or repeated phrases – ‘There’s no such thing as a grufallo’’

* Let them finish the sentences by guessing the rhyming word at the end – ‘His eyes are orange, his tongue is black, he has purple prickles all over his ????’

* Ask them to guess what happens next – making sure they know that there are no right or wrong answers, just to use their imagination

* Do some arts and crafts related to your book – you can do this after the story or to use whilst you read the story together e.g. make a mouse puppet for reading the Gruffalo

* Don’t be shy – make up actions, sound effects, strange character voices and even act the story out!

All of these things make reading together more fun for everyone, and many parents will just do them automatically. Another thing that often comes naturally, we call ‘Book Talk’ in Families Connect. This is when you chat about a book as you are reading it together and ask some questions to help your child understand and relate to the story. So, asking open questions like ‘What do you think the mouse is feeling here”, “Have you ever felt scared like that” and “What plan might you come up with faced with the Gruffalo?”. Again, this shouldn’t feel like a quiz as there are no wrong answers and you shouldn’t feel pressured to come up with a question for every page either!

We tried all of these techniques in Week 4 of Families Connect and really had lots of fun reading together. We found that a really important thing is to let your child pick a book based on their interests – any reading is good reading! To our surprise we even had one little boy who didn’t really like reading and at the end of our exercise asked if he could have another story. Well done to all our parents, that’s what success looks like!