Helping your child read at home

Session Friday 22nd March 1.45 - 2.45pm

'Helping Your Child to Read At Home’ - Parent Professional Learning Session 

Parents at Blackburn Lake Primary School had the opportunity to participate in a professional learning session to further increase their understanding about Literacy in the home and at school. The professional learning sessions was conducted in the library and was designed to strengthen the important link between home and school. The session provided parents with the necessary instructional language and techniques to foster reading development in the home and the classroom. Take home messages from the session included: 

- Economy of words, keep your talk short. 

- Give wait time 

- Let the child be independent (Don’t solve for them!) 

- Give open ended prompts first (Read that again) 

- Be specific in your praise (You pointed with your finger, that helped you, do it again) 

- Praise is just as important as prompting, don’t be silent when things are going well. 

- Sounding out is unhelpful; we need students to break words with their eyes into significant features. 

- When 1:1 correspondence is firm, students must use their eyes, not their finger. 

- Meaning comes from the picture. (Don’t cover it up!) Visual information is in the print. 

- All ‘familiar reading’ should sound like the author intended. Expect phrased and fluent reading. 

- Must have comprehension conversation following reading, link to ‘essence of story’.