Supporting Reading at Home

At Fairview we strongly believe that it is so important for teachers and parents to work together to support children in their learning, both at school and at home.

Reading with your child at home is one of the simplest but most important ways you can help your child. As you share books, you are helping improve your child’s reading skills, vocabulary, and comprehension, but also showing them how important and enjoyable reading is.

We follow the Oxford Owl reading scheme in line with our ELS phonics scheme (see here for more information on phonics). We also use books from Big Cat and Word Sparks which are also in line with the ELS scheme. All ranges of books include fiction and non-fiction texts with a variety of different themes and reoccurring characters.

Our aims for children’s reading are:

To engender a passion and love for reading within children, who become both independent and reflective readers and who can read fluently and for meaning. Throughout the Reading curriculum, children will be exposed to wide ranging and diverse texts that will develop their knowledge of themselves and the world around them, enable them to establish an appreciation of reading and the richness of vocabulary, to gain extensive knowledge across the curriculum and develop their comprehension skills. We are committed to providing children opportunities to be exposed to high-quality texts that are language-rich, which will support children in understanding what they have read and to express themselves as mature, sophisticated learners. 

Top Tips for Parents Reading at Home KS1 & KS2:

• Keep reading with your child short – you don’t need to read a whole book or chapter at once.
• Taking it in turns to read the story. Some of our books have pages for adults to read, as well as your child.
• Sit close together. You can rest the book on a table and your child can use their finger to point to each word, or they can hold the book themselves.
• Give your child time to sound out each word if they need to. They might need to do this more than once for the same word, but this is all practise.
• Be sure to give lots of praise to encourage your child with their reading.
• Can your child guess what the book is about using the title and front cover of the book? Use the pictures to help with these predictions.
• Ask questions to check your child’s understanding (see below for examples).
• Talk about the book afterwards – did your child enjoy it? Why? What was the best bit? If you read a non-fiction book, did they learn anything new? Can they share any facts with other members of their family?
• Be a good model for your children. Let them see you reading – anything and everything – newspapers, magazines, catalogues, books etc. Let them know that reading is a valuable skill. A bedtime story is also a lovely way for your child to hear you read. You could also try audiobooks (even in the car) – you are still sharing a story together. Sharing stories together stimulates conversations that you might not otherwise have.
• If your child doesn’t want to read, make sure you still read to them as much as possible. Also, be sure to mention it to your class teacher.

Additional KS2 Tips:

What books do I choose?

• Start with topics that interest your child (space, humour, dinosaurs, sport).
• The self-selection, self-interest factor is important – let children read what interests them.
• See the recommended reading lists on our school’s reading page – found here.
• Ask a librarian or your child’s teacher for recommendations.

Helpful Question Prompts

To help check that your child understands what they are reading, these bookmarks are a great prompt for questioning. Cut out the shapes and stick them back-to-back. Whilst reading with your child, try to choose one question from each section. You could ask more than one type of question per page. This will really support your child's reading at home.