Reading at Home
Reading widely and regularly has the greatest impact on writing. The best way to support reading at home is to read with your child as often as possible. Age appropriate reading lists for each year group can be found above. These can provide inspiration and ideas but will also support your child’s vocabulary development at an age-appropriate level which significantly benefits writing progress.
If your child is unable to decode words, or is a reluctant reader, you can still support reading comprehension through the use of picture books. These can be a great way to practice asking and answering inference and deduction questions around an image or text. ‘The Mysteries of Harris Burdick’ is a good example for KS2 children. Other suggested picture books can be found on the class reading lists.
There are five key elements to reading questions and these should be practised regularly. You can support your child by asking questions that encourage them to:
- Make predictions (e.g. ‘Based on the title, what do you think will happen in this text?’)
- Ask questions and find the answers (e.g. ‘How are the characters different/the same?’)
- Clarify (e.g. ‘Can you use a dictionary to find the meaning of a word you don’t understand?’)
- Visualise (e.g. ‘When you read this paragraph, what do you see? Can you describe it?’)
- Summarise (Who, what, when, where, why and how – e.g. ‘Can you tell me what happened in this paragraph?)
A bookmark template, which helps remind children of these, can also be found above.
Please encourage children to find evidence in the text to support their answers but also to use their inference skills to identify themes, feelings and hidden meaning in the texts they read.