Reading at home

Reading at home

Make reading fun

• Have fun singing along to karaoke songs or playing board games together.
• Read to your child every day. You can use your first language.
• Have a pile of reading materials available – library books (non-fiction and fiction), kids’ cookery books, simple timetables, newspapers and magazines, catalogues and any other reading that supports your child’s current interest.
• Encourage your child to retell favourite stories or parts of stories in their own words.
• Play card games (you can make the cards yourself) and board games together.

TIP: When they are reading, your child will be working at solving unfamiliar words by themself. If they need help you could ask them to work their way across the word looking for things they know that might help. At this level, reading involves bringing everything they know together to solve problems and build understanding.
If they can’t work it out – tell them and carry on with reading.

Make it real

• Reading makes more sense if your child can relate it to their own life.
• Help them to make connections with other things they might have read and to their own and family experiences. For example, "that’s a funny story about a grandad – what does your grandad do that makes you laugh?", "We saw a big mountain in that book, what is our mountain called, and where did the name come from?"
• Look for opportunities for your child to read wherever you are – signs, advertising billboards, junk mail, recipes.
• Show your child that reading is fun and important to you by letting them see you reading magazines, books, newspapers.

TIP: Help your child to link stories to their own life. Remind them about what they have done when a similar thing happens in the story.

Find out together

• Visit the library often and help your child to choose books about topics that interest them.
• Talk with older people/kaumāua in your family about interesting stories and people from your child’s past that you could find out more about together.
• Ask your child questions (and support them to find the answers) to widen their reading experiences. For example, "What’s the quickest biscuit recipe?", "What time is the next bus to town?"
• Help your child with any words that they don’t understand – look them up together in the dictionary if you need to.

TIP: If you or your child starts to feel stressed by what they’re reading, take a break and read the rest of the story aloud yourself – keep it fun.