www.womanthismonth.com 47 January 2014 I am sure that we all remember bedtime stories when we were children. There was the thrill of choosing a book and having the undivided attention of one of our parents or carers for those few precious moments before drifting off to sleep. We imagined places, characters and adventures with the help of the printed word. As fluent, capable readers we take this skill for granted seeing it as effortless, simple and automatic. Yet, we underestimate the many complex processes which are required. Consider for a moment these marks on the page, which we call letters, and the different kinds of marks that cause us to pause, which we call punctuation. Think about the combinations of letters we put together to make different sounds as well as our use of lower case and upper case letters, words that sound the same and silent letters. That is a lot for a young reader to contend with! How can we help? The best thing we can do to help our children to read is to make sure that they see us reading and, in turn, to encourage them to read. Read anything. Read the supermarket list, the name of shops, the characters in films, the newspaper and the phone book! But how, with so many different complicated elements, does a child begin to read? How do children learn to understand the squiggles and marks on the page, which we call language? And what are the first words which your child will be able to read? If you see written language as a code, then imagine your child as a code breaker. Take English as an example. Although children need to learn the names of the 26 letters in the alphabet, the process of learning to read is most commonly taught by a system called phonics. Phonemes are units of sounds and children have 42 phonic sounds to learn in order to become fluent readers. It is likely that your child will quickly begin to recognise their own name as they will be familiar with how the patterns of letters look on the page. They will then come to learn what are known as high frequency words. These are short, simple and found regularly in first reading books. These words include ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘to’, ‘and’, ‘of’, ‘in’, ‘on’ and ‘at’ to name a few. Visit www.highfrequencywords.org for ideas on how to practise these with your child. Whilst phonics is taught in schools, as parents we are the most important educators in the lives of our children and this is why it is important that you teach your child the joys of reading. Even before your child has the ability to read, they will learn skills from you such as: • directionality (whether the text goes from right to left or left to right) • how to hold a book and turn pages • a wider and richer vocabulary • how stories work • how pictures tell stories • empathy and understanding how other people may feel Reading schemes Children are usually taught to read with the use of reading schemes. These are designed in order to give your child confidence. In a child’s reading book, you will see that the vocabulary and structure will be repetitive and contain many high frequency words. Work with them and practise reading these texts as this is essential for quick progression through the system. Bear in mind that these books are tiered. As the vocabulary and sentence structures become more complex, the size of the image becomes smaller. Do encourage your child to use the images on the page to decode unfamiliar words and to guess what is happening in a story. That is why they are there — to help, to make words come alive and to keep the reader’s interest. Make it fun Reading is an essential life skill and, as Bali Rai, a fiction writer, explains, “Reading for pleasure is the single biggest factor in success later in life, outside of education. Study after study has shown that children who read for pleasure are
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