Supporting your early reader at home

When students are learning to read, it is very important that they are able to engage in lots of practice. Ideally, students are practising their decoding and fluency skills on texts containing the code that they have learnt, but sometimes they can still get stuck or need some assistance. The practice students get at home greatly assists their learning in class and builds on the repetition needed for them to be successful. Below are some tips that you might find helpful to get the most out of reading with your child. These have been created by a reading specialist, Christopher Such, and you can read the full article with more detailed explanations here.

1. Support your child to decode throughout any words they get stuck on by paying attention to all the letters and the sounds that are represented. [i] Specifically, we want students to apply their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme (letter-sound) correspondences (GPCs). Model this decoding whenever pupils get stuck on a word, and then ask the pupil to repeat what you did (e.g. ‘ch-a-m-p’ –> ‘champ’).

2. Keep an eye out if your child takes a guess at the whole word after decoding the first sound or two that is represented within it. This ‘partial-decode-then-guess’ strategy can appear successful for some pupils, but it is counter-productive over the long term, often drastically so. Again, a key aim is to support pupils to use decoding through the entire word as their go-to strategy for recognising any unfamiliar word.

3. Where your child struggles to decode polysyllabic words (i.e. words with more than one syllable), model breaking the words into syllables and decoding these piece by piece (e.g. ‘unhelpful’: ‘u-n’ –> ‘un’; ‘h-e-l-p’ –> ‘help’; ‘f-u-l’ –> ‘ful’; ‘un-help-ful’).

4. Novice readers often struggle most with blending. If this is a particular difficulty for your child, this is often because of the load placed on working memory: by the time they to the end of the word, they have forgotten the first sound they recognised. Scaffolds can help. Consider progressively blending challenging words by elongating sounds that allow this (e.g. mmmmiiiillllk –> milk).[iv] It can also be helpful to incrementally reveal graphemes, blending each time (e.g. chomp: ch –> cho –> chom –> chomp).

5. Where students are capable of decoding individual words without too much help but are still particularly dysfluent (i.e. their reading is stilted or much more stop-start than their peers), give them occasional opportunities to reread sentences, aiming for a little more flow the second or third time around.

6. Where your child struggles to the point that motivation or attention becoming a factor, consider taking turns with him/her. This might be on a sentence-by-sentence or page-by-page basis. You should try to read at a pace that is fluent but steady. You should also point at the words as you read them, modelling how to decode particularly challenging words.

7. If your child’s reading is relatively dysfluent and/or decoding is still laborious, do not expect them to make much sense of a text independently as they read. Support meaning-making by briefly discussing and summarising what the text has said. If you want a relatively dysfluent reader to independently make sense of a chunk of text, they will probably need to re-read it to the point where it *does* begin to flow.

This week, we take a peek into the learning of students Year 5.

Year 5 Excursion to St Helena Island

Our Year 5 students recently embarked on a fascinating excursion to St Helena Island, Queensland's first penal settlement outside of Brisbane. The day began with a bus ride to Manly, followed by a scenic boat trip across Moreton Bay to the island.

Once on St Helena, students stepped back in time to the 19th century, exploring the remains of the high security prison that operated from 1867 to 1932. They learned about the harsh conditions endured by prisoners, the island's self sufficient community, including farms, workshops, and a sugar mill, and the role St Helena played in shaping Queensland’s colonial history.

Students had the opportunity to examine both primary and secondary sources, deepening their understanding of Australia’s past through firsthand accounts and historical artifacts.

Our return trip was filled with natural wonders as we spotted stingrays, schools of fish, and even a few turtles gliding through the clear waters of Moreton Bay. It was a wonderful day of rich learning and historical discovery.