Children who read confidently are rarely the ones who were pushed hardest. They are usually the ones for whom reading became a small, pleasant, repeating part of the day.
Parents often ask us what they can do at home to support the reading work happening in class. The honest answer is that the most powerful thing is not a programme or a workbook. It is ten unhurried minutes, most days, in the same comfortable place.
Make it a ritual, not a task
A ritual has a predictable shape. The same chair, the same time, the same opening line. When reading has a shape, children stop negotiating about whether it happens and start negotiating about what happens inside it: which books, which voices, which page they get to turn.
- Pick a fixed moment: after dinner, before lights out, or straight after school.
- Let your child choose the book, even if it is one you have read eleven times.
- Read to them as often as they read to you. Listening is reading practice too.
- Stop while it is still enjoyable. Ending on a good page is what makes tomorrow easy.
A child who associates reading with warmth will keep returning to it long after anyone is asking them to.
Nusrat Jahan, English & Phonetics
Let them see you do it
Children copy what they notice far more than what they are told. If reading is something the adults in the house visibly enjoy, it quietly becomes a normal, grown-up thing to do. A newspaper, a recipe, a message from a relative: anything with words in it counts.
What not to do
Avoid turning reading into an assessment. Asking a child to summarise every page, or correcting every mispronounced word immediately, turns a story into a test. Let small errors pass, finish the sentence, and come back to the sounds another day.
If a book is too hard, the pleasure disappears instantly. Reading something easier than their level is not a step backwards; it is how fluency gets built. In our classrooms we deliberately keep a range of levels within reach, so a child can choose a confident book on a tired day and a stretchy one on a bright one.
When to ask us for help
If your child is avoiding reading entirely, or if the same word is unrecognisable after many meetings, that is worth a conversation with their class teacher. We would much rather adjust early than let a small gap harden into a belief that reading is not for them.
