27th September 2024
Enjoy listening to your child read – be their most favourite audience.
You play a crucial role in supporting your child’s reading and learning. With this in mind here are a few tips and tricks to help you enjoy more positive and rewarding reading with your child.
Parent App
Use the parent app to log the reading that you do with your child. From the app you can launch the child’s view so they can spend their Gems on their Boomer characters and to collect reward cards.
Download the app and find out more at boomreader.co.uk/parents
Did you know? Listening to your child read is one of the most helpful thing you can do to support their learning. Avoid it seeming like a chore by following some of these handy tips:
Logging comments on BoomReader
Example comments
- _______ was happy to read to day.
- _______ was reluctant to read today but did so.
- Read enthusiastically. I had to ask them to slow down at times.
- Was able to use their phonics to work out the trickier words.
- Didn’t remember the ‘sh’ sound in fish
Adding reading BoomReader enables you to add books, magazines or newspapers that they have read at home. Do add these to your child’s log - your child's class teacher will be interested to know what your child is reading at home.
Getting the most out of home reading
- Try to find a quiet time and place – sometimes before bed is not the best time as your child will be tired.
- Encourage children to use their phonic knowledge refer to the scheme your child’s school use
- Your child may need to use the illustrations to help them identify a word or understand the setting.
- Give your child time to have a go. It is so tempting to hurry them along or finish words for them – if you can, give them time.
- If your child is a reluctant reader mix up the reading routine. Let them read some on their own, joint read where both you and your child read aloud together, take it in turn to read a page or sentence each, provide a larger audience for your child – a pet, some teddies or toy cars can all act as an audience.
- Give lots of praise, lots of encouragement and take an interest in what they are reading.
- Use the BoomReader app to log what page your child has read to. If you are able to, log a comment or any problem words your child comes across – it will support the class-teacher to help your child further.
- If you are able find time to read a different book to your child do so, they can hear you model good reading.
Ask questions when listening to your child read.
Ask your child questions about the text. As well as some fun interaction, this will help to build their understanding of the story, not just reading the individual words.
- Here are some sample questions you can use and adapt to help you get started...
- Before reading to me, can you remember what happened previously?
- What colour was the dog?
- How do you know it was a windy day as it doesn’t say it was windy?
- Can you think of another word the author could have used instead of happy?
- What do you think will happen next?
- Can you think of a book that we have read before that has a similar meaning/ character/setting?
- How was the character feeling at the start? How are they feeling at the end?
