Adapted from an email sent to a friend.

Her child knows some letter sounds, some sight words and can attempt CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words aka is a beginning reader.

A summary of three important skills beginning readers focus on:

Sight words
Phonics
Reading for meaning

1. Sight words

The building blocks of reading are called sight words. These are words we know at a glance.

e.g.

Supercharge reading skills through practice of sight words.

Did your school send home sight words?
If not, Te Kauwhata Primary School has an excellent resource here and includes practical tips how to use them.

Self-confidence increases learning.

When teaching sight words, remember children learn best when they experience more success than failure, so let your intuition guide you to get the right balance. e.g. the first level (Magenta) starts with 25 words - but if this feels overwhelming, start with less and rotate in new words as others are learned.

2. Phonics

This is the skill of using letter sounds to decode words.

Beginning readers sound out each letter individually,
e.g. mmm———aaa———-ttt
and then run them together (with your help!).
Later, they learn how to chunk letters sounds together
e.g. ma - - - t

When learning to read, children often don’t know all their letter sounds or stumble on some. To track progress, keep an alphabet list beside you, and circle letters your child needs more support with. Revisit these letter sounds organically during the day

e.g. if your child doesn’t know the letter and sound ‘f’.
- when unpacking groceries find the written ‘f for flour’
- play word games thinking of words that start with f.
- label items in your home with the starting letter sound i.e. put an f on the fridge.

Teach your monster to read is an engaging and free online game to help learn phonics.

The actual reading part

Did your school have a chance to send home reading books? Beginning level reading books are:
- sight-word heavy
- use repetitive sentence structures, and
- have pictures clues.

For example a story might look like this:

Where is the boy?

Important reading tips:

A: “Get your pointing finger ready!”
Ensure children are correctly matching up the word they say with the written word by asking your child to physically point to the word they are reading. (Kids quickly remember the sentence pattern, and will otherwise just ‘speed read’ it from memory!)

This also reinforces to beginning readers, that each word is independent from others.

B: Model good reading strategies to help with the difficult words.
The word ‘kitchen’ (in the story above) is not a sight word. If a child is struggling with this word I’d be quick to help.

Building success builds reading skills.

With regards to reading ‘kitchen’ I might say:
”Look at the picture - where do you think he is?”
”Can you point to the first letter of the word? What letter is that? (helping if needed). What sound does that make? (helping if needed).
And if they still didn’t have it - I’d say - “oh it’s a big word - I think it’s kitchen. Does that make sense? Can you read the sentence again now with this word”.

3. Reading for meaning

Ask open-ended questions that encourage your child to share their thoughts about the story and to make connections with their own world.

Developing comprehension skills is essential, even for beginning readers, reading the most simple of stories.

E.g. Using the story above ‘Where is the boy?’ as an example, I might ask:

When you’re at home what is your favourite place to be and why?
Can you find the page where the boy has a toy in his hand? What’s a toy you might take with you everywhere?
Why do you think he was reading a book on the sofa?
What might happen next?
Where do you think he might have been going when he was in the car?
Where are some other places the boy could go?
(**After the ‘lesson’ I might challenge my student to write 2 new pages for the story, by following the same pattern (reinforcing sight words) but adding a new location and drawing a picture to match).

You’ll be able to think of the best questions, because you know your child best. Literally anything to encourage deeper discussion is perfect. Asking engaging questions develops creative and critical thinking skills, and reinforces the point that reading has a deeper meaning and purpose.

There are so many other tips to share, but I’ll stop here for now.

I hope you find reading time super special...and even delightful! I know you’re busy, but if you can carve out 10-15mins of uninterrupted time each day for a reading ‘lesson’ it might quickly become your favourite part of the day :-)

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Disclaimer: There isn’t a ‘one way’, or ‘right way’, or even the ‘best way’ to teach reading. This is simply part of the approach I’ve used to teach reading to beginning readers over the years. I tested kids regularly, so they always had books at their correct level, and by using this approach, the development across the cohort was faster than standard norms. If you have any questions, please email me at jess@myfamilyinphotos.com

READING TIPS: Beginning readers (Part I)