Hearing Your Child Read

Hearing children read is a vital part of helping them to make continued progress, whatever age and ability they are currently at.

All children are required to read at home, to an adult, during the week as part of their Home Learning activities. The individual expectations can be found in the children’s reading diaries.

It is important when hearing your child read, that as well as focussing upon the fluency, time is spent developing their ability to use inference and deduction. This is particulalry important when your child can “read” fluently. This is not the time to assume that you do not need to support them. This is where the higher order reading skills need to be developed so they are able to talk about the more complex aspects of the texts they are reading.

Reading is is a vital life skill and children do not make progress unless they practice at both home and school.

What to look for when hearing your child read

The following are some prompts that you can use when hearing your child read and when making your written comments within the reading diary.

• Can your child use a range of strategies, including accurate decoding of text, to read for simple meaning?
• Can your child understand, describe, select or retrieve information, events or ideas from the text?
• What is? What was? Where is? In which line is…? Where is the sentence that told us…?
• Can your child deduce, infer or interpret information, events or ideas from texts?
• Why did the character do/say/think …? How do you feel about……? Where did…. happen? What do you think will happen next based on what we know?
• Can your child identify and comment on the structure and organisation of texts, including grammatical and presentational features of the text?
• What does this text tell you about? Why has it been laid out in this way? [eg tables, columns] Why has a word been printed in this way? [eg bold, italics, sub-headings]
• Can your child explain about the writer’s use of language? Why has the writer used these words?
• What do these words tell you about the …..? [setting/character] Does the use of words create good images? How does that phrase make you feel?
• Can your child identify and comment on the writer’s purpose and viewpoints and the overall effect of the text on the reader?
• What does the writer mean? I wonder why the author has done that? Why did the character feel….? What do you think the writer wants you to feel about……?
• Can your child relate texts to their social, cultural and historical context and literary traditions?
• How is this character like …..e.g.someone you know/a superhero/a historical character?

When discussing and sharing ideas remember that no answer is “wrong” as long as it is justified with reference to the text. Children need to see that different interpretations of the same text are possible. Explain how you feel (remembering to refer to the text!)