Junior Sub School

Helping a beginning reader at home is all about patience, consistency, and building confidence. Create a relaxed routine, encourage your child to sound out words instead of guessing, and take turns reading harder passages together. Praise their effort over perfection to make reading a positive, rewarding experience.

Supporting your child’s reading at home is all about creating a calm, positive, and encouraging experience. Regular reading practice helps children build confidence, fluency, and important literacy skills over time. One of the best ways families can support beginning readers is by reading together often, allowing children time to work through tricky words, and celebrating their effort and progress along the way. 

The following article from ‘five from five’ talks through the “Pause, Prompt, Praise” strategy. This is a simple, research-based approach that can help guide reading practice at home, particularly with beginning readers and make reading both successful and enjoyable for your child.

Home reading

Practising reading books aloud is very important for literacy development. Reading with a parent or carer is a great opportunity to do this, and some simple techniques can help guide reading practice at home.

The ‘Pause, Prompt, Praise’ method is research-based and effective.

When your child has difficulty reading a word, the following routine has been shown to be the best way to help them:

1. PAUSE — this is an important step because children can often work the word out if given the time. They read more slowly than we do and need time to think. If we jump in too quickly, not only do we make them reliant on us to help them, but we undermine their self-confidence.

• For beginning readers, pause for 3-5 seconds to give them a chance to decode the word.
• For older readers, if they misread a word, wait until they get to the end of the sentence before interrupting. They may need to get to the end of the sentence before they realise the sentence doesn’t make sense and they may self-correct. We want readers to be able to read for meaning, and self-correcting is an important skill for them to develop. If we immediately stop and correct them, we undermine the development of this process.

2. PROMPT— if your child cannot read the word or they misread a word and do no self-correct, we can offer prompt.

• For beginning readers:
  • Start with a general phonic prompt. You could say: “Sound out the letters in the word.”
  • If they still make an error, offer a more specific phonic prompt. For example, “Look at [point to letter], what sound does it make?”. You can also sound out the word for them with a slight pause between each sound (e.g. f … r … o … g), then encourage your child to sound it out themselves and then blend all the letters in the word (e.g. f … r … o … g – frog)
  • If they got some letter sounds correct, you can point out the one they need to focus on: “You got the first two sounds correct, try the next one again.”
  • After two prompts, if they still have difficulty, tell them the word – and move on.
• For older readers:
  • Offer a general phonic prompt first: “Have a look at the letters in the word”.
  • If the general prompt doesn’t work, try a specific phonics prompt. For example, if they made an error with the letters ‘aw’ in ‘dawn’, point to ‘aw’ and say “The letters ‘a’ and ‘w’ together make the /or/ sound. Try reading the word again.”
  • If the word is very tricky, provide them with the word and move on.
  • If the word is long, break it into its syllables. It may also help to cover parts of the word and reveal sections as they decode.
  • After two prompts, if they still have difficulty, provide the word – and move on.

3. PRAISE is an important part of reading, and you should give specific praise when your child has attempted to decode a word, self-corrected an error, read the word correctly after a prompt, or read a sentence, paragraph or page without making errors. Praise should be specific, e.g: “It’s a tricky word – you tried so hard to read it!”, “You figured that out by yourself”, “You worked that out with only a little bit of help”, or “You read the whole page correctly. Great job!”

Remember to spend some time recapping with your child about what they have read. This will depend on the text your child is reading. If the text is very simple, ask your child some questions about what they have read every couple of pages. For more complex or dense text, you can ask questions after a couple of paragraphs. You can also ask your child to give you a summary of what they have read. There are no strict rules for recapping and asking comprehension questions – we just want to ensure your child knows that the aim is to read for meaning. If they need to, they can reread the pages before answering. Rereading sections of text can help with fluency and expression too! 

Jennie McDonald

Learning Specialist