Good Shepherd School

  • Encourage breaking unfamiliar words independently

  • Begin to break unknown words into syllables

  • Respond confidently to inferential questions beginning with ‘Why do you think?’

  • Encourage your child to read a variety of genres, e.g. reports, autobiographies, narratives

  • Read emails from family and whanau aloud

  • Talk about the pictures in books.  Be a role model.  Let your child see you enjoying reading and talk about what are you enjoying

  • Make some puppets - old socks, tubes of paper or card that you and your child can use to act out plays

  • Visit the library often and help your child to choose books about topics that interest them

  • Read to your child everyday.  You can use your first lanuage

  • Ask your child questions (and support them to find the answers) to widen their reading experiences, e.g. "what time is the next bus to town?”

  • Help your child with any words that they don’t understand.  Look them up in the dictionary if you need to

  • Show your child that reading is fun and important to you by letting them see you reading magazines, books and newspapers

  • Help your child make connections with things they might have read and relate to their own experiences

  • Read recipes, instruction manuals, maps, signs and emails.  It will help your child to understand that words can be organised in different ways on a page

  • Encourage your child to read all sorts of things - TV Guide, street signs, food labels

  • Read junk mail - your child could compare costs, make up their own ‘advertisements’ by cutting up and rearranging the sentences

  • Encourage your child to read to others.  Brothers and sisters and grandparents are great audiences for practising smooth and interesting reading out loud

  • Find books of movies or TV programmes. It can help your child to learn different ways to tell the same story if they read the ‘stories’ they have watched

  • Help your child share their thinking.  Get them to share opinions and talk about why they think that

  • Encourage internet research about topics of interest - notice what your child is interested in

  • Ask questions about your child’s story or book, e.g. about the main events, characters

  • Ask open-ended questions about the book, e.g. "Why do you think that happened?”

  • Encourage your child to tell you about a story, or chapters from a book in their own words

  • Talk to your child while you are together.  Use the language that works best for your child

  • Encourage your child to read a wide range of reading material, e.g. magazines, papers, TV guides and cookbooks

  • Set up a reward programme to encourage reading at home

  • Act out stories and plays

  • Encourage brothers and sisters to read to each other

  • Take part in reading nights (No TV)

  • Listen to CD story books

  • Read items or text that has instructions, e.g. cookbooks, board game rules

  • When travelling, encourage your child to read street signs

  • Read and locate information in newspapers or on food packets

  • Read a variety of non-fiction texts which are of interest to your child

  • Retell a story in the correct order including as much detail as possible

  • Re-read books and poetry to build up expression

  • Ask questions about the text that require a thoughtful answer

  • Practise fluency by re-reading familiar texts

  • ITC LINKS