Parent workshop - Helping your child read their reading book
To be a good reader we need to be able to decode words and understand what they mean.
We can use our phonic knowledge to read the first word but what does it mean? We use our experiences and understanding of words we already know to help us understand what we are reading. For example, the second word is made of 2 smaller words that we already know… ‘dust’ and ‘bin’. Even if we didn’t know the word ‘dustbin’ we might think that it is a bin for dust.
Some books help develop sight vocabulary and comprehension. These are good books to read whilst children have developed enough phonic knowledge to read simple words.
Other books contain only the words children can read based on the phonic knowledge they have learnt at school. Children need to use this knowledge to blend phonemes (sounds) together to read the words.
When reading a sentence it is important to develop fluency and automaticity. This means that children read the whole sentence smoothly remembering the words they have already blended together.
They should be able to read the whole sentence without stopping. This helps them to understand what the sentence is about.
