Learning and Teaching
All students attending St Louis de Montfort's Aspendale have the right to feel safe. The care, safety and wellbeing of children and young people is a fundamental responsibility of all within our school.
Does your child ever express frustration about reading? Do you wish they would read more at home? Are you keen to help your child but not sure of the best approach?
Sometimes a child may have the basics of reading under control, but they still don’t seem to enjoy the process or have trouble understanding what they’ve read.
From a child’s perspective, they might express their frustration and difficulties in a general way, with statements like “I hate reading!” or “This is stupid!”.
A key component of reading is FLUENCY. Fluency is essential and could help overcome some of the reading challenges your child may be experiencing.
If a child could more articulately describe how fluency difficulties affect their reading they might say:
- I just seem to get stuck when I try to read a lot of the words in this chapter.
- It takes me so long to read something and I can’t keep track of it.
Reading this book takes so much of my energy, I can’t even think about what it means.
From the parent perspective, you might notice your child reads very slowly or without any expression. Maybe they don’t pay attention to the punctuation so there’s no meaningful phrasing or they stumble a lot and lose track of where they’re up to. These are issues that can be addressed by working on fluency and there are ways you can help at home.
Fluency is a focus for us at St Louis this year because we understand how important it is for students to have this skill. We understand the strong connection to comprehension and being able to enjoy reading. We know how important it is to free up working memory so our students can think more about what they are reading and less about how to read.
We look forward to working in partnership with our St Louis families.
Angela Healy - English Leader