Good morning everyone. Last week we focused on how to support your children with spelling at home. The focus this week will move to Reading where I will share tips to engage your child in reading and how to extend their reading and comprehension skills.
There are any ways to support reading at home especially with our younger pupils. A great site to support this and share ideas is Reading Rockets with lots of helpful hints about what to do around the house and with everyday routines. Some suggestions include:
- An essential step in learning to read is good books read aloud. Parents who read aloud to their children are teaching literacy concepts simply by sharing books. Encourage your children to listen, ponder, make comments, and ask questions.
- Show your child a recipe and go over it together. Ask your child to read the recipe to you as you work, and tell the child that each step must be done in a special order. Let your child help mix the ingredients. Allow your child to write down other recipes from the cookbook that he or she would like to help make.
- Encourage your child to make a dictionary by putting together several sheets of paper for a booklet. Ask your child to write at the top of each page a new word he or she has recently learned. If the word can be shown in a picture, have him or her look through magazines and newspapers to find pictures that illustrate the words and paste them on the correct pages.
When you read with your child a good way to help them share their understanding of what they have read is by using your Helping High 5 Retell Hand. Every finger on your hand has a different theme:
- Characters: Talk about the characters using their names and maybe describe their personality, behaviours and role in the story.
- Setting: Where is the story taking place, describe the setting and how this helps to set the scene for rest of the story.
- Beginning: What was the main event at the start of the story, who were the characters involved in the beginning. What do you think will happen next.
- Middle: What happened in the middle, was there a problem that needed resolved, did any new characters get introduced, did the setting change. How to you think the problem will be resolved.
- End: How did the problem get resolved. Could you change the ending
You can ask your child questions using these themes about what they have read. I have included 2 templates to help you support your child with retelling and to use as a cue to help them remember the key events.
Tomorrow we will look at specific questioning such as Understanding, Analysing and Evaluating using Blooms with a different theme each day.
As always please don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you have any questions or would like more resources or ideas to help you support your child.
Have a good Monday,
Mrs Docherty
