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Value Added – My take on Teaching Reading ++

There are three skills involved in reading

1. Sounding out / decoding words is the most vital skill. When decoding a new word, the child should always say the sounds or syllables a few times to see if they can recognise the word.
2. Visual recognition of words. This is vital to develop the fluency of reading. As time goes by, there are new common words and words from key phonic patterns which I think benefit from direct teaching and practise, so that they are recognised with growing ease. The kind of words that spring to mind are ‘want’, ‘can’t’, ‘one’, ‘talk’, ‘really’, ‘could’, ‘might’ and ‘found’. You can put some of them on cards and play matching and reading games.
3. The use of meaning (semantics), context and grammar (syntactics). This initially even includes pictures! These areas align with prediction skills i.e. what word could follow another one. Here are some examples: -
   • In a passage about Australian animals, a long word beginning with ‘k’ is more likely to be ‘kangaroo’ than ‘king’.
   • If a sentence ends in a question mark and the first word starts with ‘wh’, the word is more likely to be ‘when’ ‘why’ or ‘what’ than ‘wheel’.
   • A word preceded by a definite or indefinite article, ‘a’ or ‘the’ will be followed by a noun such as ball, rather than a verb such as bake.
   • These kinds of reactions build up with practice.

Reading along with a child in the early stages is very helpful and it develops fluency.

Multisyllabic Words

When your child is reading with some fluency, I find multisyllabic words are well worth practising. Words like ‘animal’, ‘hospital’, ‘remember,’ ‘fantastic’ and ‘family’ are all amazing words to develop further fluency. Even before that, I find practising reading two-syllable words such as rabbit, dentist, traffic, sudden – to be very useful.