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!

`It is difficult as busy parents to always find time to listen to our children, especially if they are little chatterboxes! However, listening to them makes them feel valued and helps their development in so many ways. It also helps us to understand how they see the world, what they might be finding hard and what they might be feeling.
Crucially, it has also been shown that if children trust us to listen to the little things, they will share the big stuff with us as well. But there are so many things that can easily get in the way of us listening to our children, no matter how well-intentioned we are. I wonder what the biggest barriers are for you?
We did an exercise in Week 3 of Families Connect where some parents deliberately (and secretly) tried to be ‘bad listeners’, as others parents excitedly talked about something important to them. Despite brainstorming all the nasty things we might do to be bad listeners, the thought of being rude and hurtful made it really hard to pull off! Because we all know what it feels like when we aren’t being listened to, and we all know what to look for in a ‘good listener’.
Our children are no exception. Yet we realised during the exercise, that we can sometimes ignore them more easily than we would an adult, even a stranger! So, what can help us to be a good listener for our children:
• Finding the right time – try to listen when we can but if we cannot give our attention (e.g. when we are reverse parallel parking!) it’s fine to say we want to listen, explain why we cannot at that time and when we will listen, and live up to that promise
• Show we are interested – words of encouragement are good but tone of voice and body language make a far greater impact
• Be encouraging – eye contact, focused attention, affirmative words etc all help to encourage our children to share with us
• Don’t be dismissive – even if things seem trivial to us, they are important enough for our children to want to talk about them
• Ask open questions – these have longer answers and encourage more talk
All of these pretty simple tips can help us to listen carefully to our children, a small investment that really can make a huge impact on how valued they feel.

Did you know that for every one positive comment our children hear, on average, most will hear 8 negative comments? Now, we can’t really feel bad when we have to shout ‘don’t run onto the road’ or ‘don’t put that pea up your nose’! But it does sound a bit imbalanced doesn’t it.
The problem is that it is positive comments, from people that matter, that can have a brilliant impact on children’s self-esteem, their sense of value. This feeling of self-worth helps their confidence, their ability to learn and their belief that they can do anything. So, whilst we are busy keeping them safe, we might also remember that it is catching them being good that is more valuable, than catching them being naughty.
Research also shows that some types of praise are more ‘helpful’ than others for children in valuing themselves and growing in confidence. In the second week of Families Connect the parents had a shot of practising this ‘helpful praise’ with each other, before being let loose on the children! We practised ‘good praise’ and ‘bad praise’ and were left in no doubt about which felt best and was more helpful.
With the children, we made superstar awards. These were taken home as a reminder to parents to look for the positives and to praise everyday little things, using the stars in whatever way worked for their family. For the children, the awards were simply to make them feel valued and to understand what they were doing well. For one family it definitely worked, with one little girl feeling SO valued she sported her award for an entire weekend in all weathers!
So, what is this ‘helpful praise’ I hear you ask? It’s simple really, when praising your children think about making it:
• Specific – this is so that children know what to do next time…’I love your story and you have done a great job of remembering capital letters and full stops. Well done.’
• Genuine – children can spot when the words don’t match the facial expression and body language!
• Focused on effort – rather than the outcome (‘you won!’). By focusing on the effort and approach taken, children know that trying is important, that they don’t have to be stuck at being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at something, they can practice and get better. It also means they will be happier to try something new.
• Without a sting in the tail – ‘what a great drawing, next time you might want to give the person facial features!’. When children hear praise mixed with criticism, they only remember the criticism.
Use these tips to try switching the 8:1 ratio and encourage our children to do more of the stuff that gets them praised. Some of this might not come naturally at first, but practice makes perfect!

Have you ever tried to tackle a tricky job whilst feeling angry? Ever tried to engage in a meeting at work when something at home is really worrying you? It’s hard to concentrate when emotions are running high. That is what it’s like for our children. For them to concentrate on their learning, this requires managing a whole range of, often uncomfortable, feelings; it requires them being in a ‘good headspace’. We all know the horrors of tackling homework when they are too tired, too frustrated or even too excited about something else!

But it’s even harder than that for our children. We know the words to use to describe feelings. We know how they might impact our bodies, faces, our thoughts, even our actions and behaviours. Our children are still getting good at this. They need help to associate with, recognise and name all the feelings that they might experience. They need practice in talking about their feelings. When they become more confident naming and understanding feelings, then they are better able to manage them and focus on their learning. That’s got to be easier all round!
We cheated! We had some tools to help us talk about feelings with our children – a magnifying glass to hold over parts of our body that might give us clues to our emotions. Held over a ‘washing machine’ tummy, as one mum brilliantly put it, for example when we are anxious. In time children learn that this feeling doesn’t mean they are unwell, but scared about something and that is the first step to dealing with those feelings.

We also had the help of a feelings fan, a set of cards showing drawings of children with the 6 universally recognisable feelings – happy, angry, scared, surprised, sad and disgust. As you know there are many more feelings! But these are a good place to start when talking to your children. You can see our fans in the picture below….you might like to make your own feelings fan at home and use it as a prompt when chatting about your children’s feelings or even your own!