1. Don’t make them read

Granted, this sounds a little strange, but reluctant readers are often readers who are lacking in confidence. They may be early readers who have never really got off the starting blocks, or they may be slightly older readers who have told themselves – or been told at some stage – that they are not ‘good’ at reading. They soon stop attempting to read because they have already predicted their own failure. There is little more painful – educationally speaking – than sitting next to a child you are meant to be ‘hearing’ read and watching them struggle to sound out every word. If this is the case with your child/student, then stop. Go back and don’t make them read for a while: read to them instead, letting them see the words on the page, allowing them to focus upon the joy of reading a story, which is where a life-long love of books is really born. They need to re-engage before they can begin again to read.

2. Start with bite-size chunks

When my son was in reception class and going through a particularly resistant phase with reading his school books, I had to try to figure out a way to work around it. He had passed the early stage where his books consisted of 5 pages of ‘Tap, tap, tap!’ ‘Pat, pat, pat!’ and had realised that 24 pages of book with a proper story was going to require a little more effort on his part…Instead of insisting that he always read his school book when we were having our reading time at home, I would sometimes write him a couple of silly sentences which he liked to read, such as, ‘The clouds are made of cheese.’ The sillier the better, really! If he had a particular word he had to learn that week I could also incorporate that into a sentence and it seemed like a lot less of a chore than reading a whole book.

3. Let them read anything (well, within reason…)

The list is really endless here, but the point is that everything counts as reading: the back of cereal packets at breakfast time, road signs, house names,  ‘for sale’ signs on your way to school, ‘no parking’ signs. Any type of book counts too: some children find non-fiction far more appealing, so go with what they like and encourage them in any interests that they have. My 6 year old is currently stuck in the middle of a ‘Dr. Who’ phase and his favourite book is a compendium of monsters, which he can often be found poring over, rating each monster on their strength or speed or ‘scariness’ factor. As adults we read for pleasure, but we often forget that children’s reading should be just the same.

4. Let them write and read  

This is another strategy that worked well with us. We put up a large whiteboard in our kitchen and let the children write on it. They could write anything that they wanted to, but they had to read it back to us. Of course they didn’t spell the words correctly initially, but that didn’t matter. We also wrote words on the board and they read them back to us. Then we progressed to sentences and pretty soon they were reading those too. You can also – if you have a magnetic board – buy the first 100 words as magnets and stick them up there for your children to find and play around with. Whatever you do, don’t drill them on the words: just leave them to play and explore and soon they’ll be creating whole sentences and proudly showing them to you.

5. Work out what kinds of reading strategies they use

When I was at school, I’m pretty sure we followed the ‘look and say’ method of learning to read, but today it’s all about phonics. In itself, it’s a mixed method approach anyway – as we all know how ‘un-phonetic’ our spelling system is – and some words (‘tricky words’) just have to be learned by sight the way most of my generation would be familiar with. However, this – like any method – does not work best for all children. Some find it a real struggle to blend individual sounds into words and it can hold back their early reading – and confidence – considerably if this is the sole method that is relied upon. Some children are just more natural ‘sight readers’ – they see the whole word and learn it by remembering it by sight, rather than by blending the sounds together. Watch and see how your child seems to learn best and discuss it with their teacher. Most schools – whilst using phonics as their main method of teaching early reading – are willing to be flexible and every good teacher sees their students as individuals.

 

‘There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book.’ Frank Serafini.

 

 

My recent blog post about the abysmally depressing focus upon quantifiable results and the effect this has had upon education, particularly in the primary sector, where it is least appropriate, got me thinking:  ‘How can a parent who doesn’t want to spend vast amounts of time at home drilling children in phonics and partitioning, still support and encourage learning?’ I came up with this list of 4 fairly simple activities which don’t take an awful amount of time and – most importantly – don’t really feel like work.

1. Read, read, read! This is hardly revelatory, but there really is a huge difference in progress between those children who are regularly read to/with at home and those who aren’t. It doesn’t have to be every night: I read my children’s school books with them every night but mainly because I think it’s better to focus upon reading 4 pages every night than it is to try to do 12 pages a couple of times a week. You don’t need to complete a whole book a night: little and often is best. Often those children who are made to read a lot every night and quickly whiz through reading levels don’t actually properly comprehend what they are reading and reading becomes merely a mechanical exercise, not a true exercise in understanding. So, as well as trying to focus on little and often, also ask your child questions about what they are reading to check their understanding. Most children love being asked their opinion on something. Questions don’t have to be deep and meaningful but can be as simple as ‘What do you think about X’s character?’ ‘What do you like about this story?’ ‘Can you tell me what’s happened so far?’ Moreover, reading shouldn’t be limited to school books, or even books in general. Take the opportunity to read wherever and whenever you are: road signs, shop signs, cereal packets and so on. Most of this is often child-initiated, which leads me on to my second point…
2. Naturally Occurring Learning. This is where primary children seem to earn at a great pace, without being conscious that what they’re doing is learning. Examples of this are when children seek out knowledge for themselves – as in the ‘signs’ example above – which they do all the time. There are, however, ways to encourage this further, whilst still leaving it to the child to take the lead. At home, we eat our breakfast and tea sitting at a table in our kitchen. On the kitchen wall – amongst other things – is a clock and a 100 square. Occasionally, I will ask my 6 year old, ‘What time is it now?’ but more often than not, he will ask me, every time we sit down: ‘is it half past four?’ ‘is it a quarter past twelve?’ At first, he was pretty stuck on his ‘past’ and ‘to’ times but now he’s on the ball every time. I admit, I did try to teach him at first, but he didn’t respond well –  (‘Mummy, I’m just not listening to you!’) –  so I left him to his own devices and he figured it out himself. The same happened with both my children and the 100 square. I didn’t say a word about it, just put it up (okay, my husband actually hung it up…) and let them notice it. Pretty soon, they started playing with it – my least favourite game being ‘Mummy, guess which number I’m staring at!’ – and learning as they went. Some days, they will ask each other to find one more or one less than a number – ‘playing teacher’ –  and my little girl likes counting in 5s down the square. I love this because it’s a pretty lazy way of learning with them and takes no extra time out of an already jam-packed schedule. But most importantly, it’s child-initiated and it’s fun.
3. Mother’s little helper. One thing both my children like to do is ‘helping’. This often isn’t so great: yesterday, for example, they were both keen to help with the weeding, which apparently involves depositing large amounts of mud all across the driveway and then going in after 10 minutes to watch Dr. Who. However, ‘helping’ can also be harnessed in a much more constructive way: my four year old often likes to help me write a shopping list – particularly when there’s something she desperately wants me to buy – and this can be a good opportunity to practise the dreaded phonics and writing without it seeming too much of a chore. Ask your child to chose one item they’d like to have on the list and then ask them to think of the letter sound it starts with and to write it down if they can. Once you’re in the shop, ask them to help you read the signs and to look for particular items. They can also count fruit into bags, look for numbers on the checkouts or even select coins to pay for a treat. All this, under the guise of ‘helping’ – by now, my children must think I am a spectacularly incompetent parent – seems to go down well. This can be repeated any number of times with other tasks: sorting and counting washing, baking a cake and – my favourite – sharing out Smarties equally at treat time.
4.  Have fun with words. Essentially, learn to play with language. Children mostly don’t need to be taught this, as it’s what they do all the time, but us adults usually have to re-learn it. A variation of the ‘headband’ game can be great for this: make paper ‘headbands’ for each person and then make cards with types of animals or types of food, or items of clothing, etc., etc. on them and then stick each card on a headband. The person wearing the headband won’t know what word they’re ‘wearing’ so will have to ask questions to guess. Some of these questions can be focused upon letter sounds, or the number of letters in a word, or what a word rhymes with. Other ideas that have worked for us include exploring ‘nonsense’ language – the Lewis Carroll poem ‘Jabberwocky’ is a long-standing favourite for this and never seems to fail, particularly if you let children make up their own ‘nonsense’ words – and also exploring children’s poetry, which is often neglected. A favourite from my childhood – and now in its 30th anniversary year – is Allan Ahlberg’s ‘Please Mrs Butler’ which has the added bonus of containing subversive re-writings of school hymns. And the best thing? You don’t need to do anything with these poems other than read aloud and enjoy.

Overall, the most important point is that none of these activities should really   seem like you or your child is doing work. I doubt that any of them would be government-approved approaches for use in school and that is entirely the point…