Teaching and Learning

Effective Strategies to support your child engaging in learning 

Pausing, Prompting and Rephrasing

Pausing

The purpose of pausing is to allow students time to gather their thoughts in order to:

 a) process what the task requires them to do  

b) clarify their understanding in their own head about what they are being asked of them

 c) think about how they will respond

Extended pause time by your child (greater 10 seconds), it may indicate a need to support the student’s response to a question/task by prompting or rephrasing.

Prompting

Providing extra information or support to assist your child to respond

For example, if your child responds briefly to a question you may say ‘Tell me more about that’ or ‘What makes you think that?’ to draw a more extended response

Rephrasing

You can support your child to develop a deeper understanding of what is required by saying something in another way.

Offering Praise and Encouragement

There are many ways to praise your child’s efforts…

… and reinforce the demonstrated learning behaviours by stating what your child did to help themselves as a learner.

For example,   Spot on – you looked at the words as you were reading.

        You did it that time! – you looked at the picture to help work out the words.

        Good Work – you waited until it was your turn.

         Well done - you thought about the question before you answered.

         Great job -  you sounded out the word to help you write it.

Explicit feedback will support your child in understanding what they did that made their attempt successful.