“The overarching aim for English in the national curriculum is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written word, and to develop their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment.”
Reading matters
Reading is one of the most valuable habits we can instill in children. Beyond its clear role in improving literacy, it offers a wealth of wider benefits and opens up a world of opportunity. By encouraging all kinds of different reading, be that following a recipe together, listening to an audiobook or having a bedtime story, children develop the skills and emotional intelligence needed to thrive both in and out of the classroom.
Why reading at home matters
In schools, teachers teach reading, and are part of creating a school reading culture that values all elements of reading. But parents and families play an important role too.
We all know that the best readers in our classes are not those who only read in school. The most competent, confident, and enthusiastic readers also read outside the classroom – at home.
“Parental involvement in a child’s literacy has been reported as a more powerful force than other family background variables, such as social class, family size and level of parental education”
(Flouri and Buchanan, 2004 – cited in Clark and Rumbold, 2006)
What can parents do?
Teachers are the experts in teaching reading. Parents are not teachers, but they bring a different and unique contribution to their children’s reading lives. Parents may not realise the value of their role, so part of a school’s job is to communicate the value of all reading and the special things parents bring which schools cannot provide.
Parents can:
- Support the social aspects of reading by enjoying reading together
- Make emotional connections through reading
- Read to their children (or listen to audiobooks together)
- Talk about reading together
- Know about their children’s interests and use this to pick things to read
- Give children opportunities to make choices about what to read
- Read to/with them in home languages
- Read culturally significant stories and other texts
- Orally retell stories from their own childhoods
- Value reading for its own sake by making reading enjoyable
- Show children that adults read too
- Give their children time to read on their own
- Connect reading to real life, e.g. noticing a place is like one in a story
- Read for real life purposes
- Support children to practise skills they have learned in school
- Help children re-read for supporting fluency
All of this is about giving their child a varied and enjoyable reading diet
What is the reading diet?
Our reading log is built on a philosophy that a varied and enjoyable reading diet is important for children’s reading learning and continued motivation to read – cultivating enjoyment of reading is key to this. We have created our Reading Diet to help families encourage reading with a rich but realistic framework for reading at home, which is focused on integrating reading into family life.
The Reading Diet will be slightly different for children at different ages and stages of reading development. However, all reading diets (like our “healthy plate” model of a balanced food diet) have the same constituent parts:
- Reading aloud (either from their school reading book, phonics ditties, or something else they have chosen)
- Listening together (either listening to a person or to an audiobook together)
- Reading independently (looking at pictures, reading words, listening to audiobooks)
- Reading in the real world (from signs to packaging to recipes to forms)
The children who regularly do all these things have the best possible opportunity to enjoy reading, see themselves as readers, and have the will to become increasingly competent readers.
Want to learn more about what makes a good ‘reading diet’?
Watch the recording of our webinar with English and Reading Curriculum Lead, Florence Lupton and School Delivery Lead, Amelia Ernest-Jones:
