Reading Together

In this post we are exploring ways to make reading together a fun and enticing activity — for kids as well as the supervising adult.

The Common Reading Scene

A parent and child snuggled together to read…. The child is thrilled with excitement, and then that joy vanishes. The adult corrects or points out your mistakes with every other word you read, and now what should be fun, feels like a chore. Parenthood-gone-wrong happens, when frustration creeps in and before you know it, tears replace smiles.

Reading is hard for a lot of kids to learn but fostering a love of books in them is so crucial. In addition, reading is an excellent way to acquire vocabulary and spelling also function as a well-deserved rest.

How to Make a Good Reading Experience

1. Reading Together: Read as a Team! Read sentences or paragraphs aloud, providing a time-space to do so. Allow your child to be in the driver's seat and keep it fun and light-hearted.

2. Begin with Picture Books — These books have lots of pictures and very little text. Building an independent love of reading without the pressure creating your own stories together .

3. Be Supportive: Just tell your child the word if they struggle with it. Flow with the story and "use sound(s)" for exploring difficult words in conjunction with clues within the story.

4. Choose Stories Based on What Your Child Loves. If your child struggles to read 5 or more words in a piece of content, this will probably prove to be too hard, so look for an alternative simpler text.

5. Mind stress: If either of you become anxious, take a break. We want to keep it fun, so think positively and stay cool.

6. Read Together: You read quietly next to your child. This allows children to listen and practice reading along, which builds their confidence. It works like them reading along to an audio book.

7. Celebrate Every Win — Acknowledge every effort! Cheer when your child recognises a word that they didn't previously recognise or completes a sentence. It boosts their moral,

Fun Reading Games

Reading Cards: A game we use at Clara James is to create a set of 'cards' containing an image of something the child is interested in or your family pet, them, etc. Amongst the picture cards, also have some blank ones. Deal half the cards each. Take turns drawing a card, and whoever draws the card reads this next part. It is a fun way to alleviate some of the pressure!

Themed Board Games: I've mentioned the dotty board game before. It works in a similar way to the game above except this time you will need 3x 6 images on a sheet of paper. Spread them around the edge. Each of you picks an image. (You can be a puppy, I'll be a dinosaur. The other image might be an ice-cream). If anyone lands on the puppy, you have to read. If anyone lands on a dinosaur, I read. Then if anyone lands on the ice-cream, you roll again and do a forfeit (have another go, read another page, etc). The goal is to spread the reading, ease the pressure and to make it more fun for everyone involved.

Silly Sentences: One of my favourite games when we are focusing on structuring sentences, handwriting, or punctuation, is silly sentences. It’s easy to create and can be quite funny. A couple of people I’ve played it with in the past haven’t enjoyed writing sentences that they see as not making sense rather than bizarre, but I will explain it just in case you want to give it a go.

Write, maybe 10 or so sentences along the lines of:

The black cat ate quietly.

The orange fish swam quickly.

The old dog snored loudly.

The green parrot flew gracefully.

The wise owl looked eagerly.

Once you have all 10 cut them up and put the face down in piles of openers, adjectives, noun, verb, adverb. Then individually shuffle each pile.

 The first person then takes a word from the top of each pile and writes it down to create a new ‘silly sentence’. They might reveal something like: The orange dog flew gracefully. Other times you might get something less inspiring such as: the black dog ate eagerly.

You can use multiple adjectives if you want to which will make the sentences more entertaining and descriptive, but it very much depends on your focus.

Enjoy it though, and I hope you get some ‘interesting’ results.

Celebrate Progress

And don't forget to celebrate every small win. Celebrate the accomplishments of your child with the family and think about modest rewards. It helps build confidence.

We want to make sure that when it comes to reading for a child, its all joy and absolutely no fear.

Happy reading!