Leader of Pedagogy

The school holidays are a great opportunity to spend some time listening to your child read at home. In order to be a balanced reader, children need to be able to decode words, read with correct fluency and phrasing, and comprehend what they are reading. 

Decoding words can involve strategies such as sounding out words, chunking and blending sounds together. When students read with fluency, they should have appropriate pace, using intonation and expression. To fully understand a text, students need to have both literal and inferential comprehension skills. Literal comprehension involves a student basing their understanding on information explicitly stated within the text. Inferential comprehension involves students using real life experience and prior knowledge to understand the text on a deeper level. Both literal and inferential comprehension are needed for a student to fully understand what they are reading.

To help your child improve their literacy skills, there are some helpful points:

• Use their finger for 'tracking'. This helps your child to read the words from left to right, saying each word aloud. Decoding words is also easier if a student can point to/identify each sound within the word.
• Read the words smoothly 'like we talk'.
• Use picture cues to help their understanding of the text.
• Being aware of punctuation when reading, such as pausing at full stops and commas, adding expression at exclamation marks, using expression when reading text in speech marks. 
• Re-reading a sentence if it doesn't make sense.
• Talk about the characters and what happened in the story, or having a discussion about the information given in non-fiction texts.
• Giving an opinion about the characters, topic or whole text.

Enjoy the holiday break,

Holly Greenaway