How can I help my child with speaking and listening?

1. Ensure that:

• they have plenty of opportunities for talk
• you listen to them with attention, and respond
• they hear and listen to sustained talk by others.

2. Encourage them to speak at length, by:

• helping them take a long turn in a conversation
• prompting them to help them keep going
• asking them to tell you about some event in detail or explain to you how something works.

3. Help them understand how speakers help listeners, by:

• using repetition and different voices for different characters when telling a story
• encouraging them to think about how to organise what they want to say
• changing their pace.

4. Encourage them to notice and talk about:

• interesting/unusual words
• some of the different ways people speak.

 

How can I help my child with reading?

1. Ensure they have:

• access to books, magazines and newspapers from home, school and library
• somewhere quiet to read that is relaxing and comfortable
• time to read regularly
• opportunities to see you as a reader – reading, choosing books, going to the library, talking about what you read.

2. Read to them and take turns with them in reading a section each of the text, supporting and prompting their reading in positive ways.

3. Talk with them about the books they read:

• use the cover and title to predict what the text will be about and what sort of book it is
• discuss their favourite part or character and your favourite part
• ask how the illustrations support the story
• explore what makes the book different from (or similar to) others they have read.

4. Talk about the meaning of what they have read. Ask them, for example, to explain:

• how they know that X is the villain or Y the heroine
• why they like or dislike a particular character
• what will happen next and why they think so
• a character’s actions or motives
• the meaning of difficult words and encourage your child to use these new words in sentences when talking to you.

 

How can I help my child with writing?

1. Ensure they have:

• opportunities to write at home (e.g. shopping lists, sending letters and cards to friends and relations, writing emails, keeping a diary, publishing personal stories, labelling photos in the family album, and leaving notes
• pencils, pens, crayons, but also card or folded paper to make booklets
• opportunities to see you as a writer, for example, writing emails or lists.

2. Read and talk about their writing:

• ask them to read their writing aloud to you
• respond to the writing and praise what you like
• ask them to explain why they wrote particular sections as they did.

3. Help them with planning their writing:

• ask them to talk through their ideas with you before they write
• prompt them to include more detail, sequence things more clearly, vary the pace.

4. Help them to think about the person who will read their writing:

• do they want the reader to like the main character?
• should they include some clues about the ending?
• does the writing build up to a climax?

5. Create a community of writers:

• provide a quiet place for writing with lots of writing materials
• leave notes for each other
• play writing games e.g. one person writes the beginning, another the middle and the other the end of a family story
• write together

 

How can I make learning spelling as fun as possible?

Key Stage 1 (age 5–7)

1. Spot letter patterns in words.Ask your child to point out words that look like they should rhyme but don’t(e.g. home and come; do and no) and words which do rhyme even though they look different (e.g. come and sum; there, bear, hair). This will help with their writing too.

2. Play word/spelling gameslike Junior Scrabble, Bananagrams and Boggle to focus on blending letter sounds to make words.

3. Write a word out– it could be a word from the weekly spellings list – cut it up and ask your child to put it back in the correct order.

4. Use flashcards to help your child remember the weekly spellings and/or write the words out: look, say, cover, write, look back to check it!

5. Make it an acrostic. Sometimes, visualising a difficult word in a different way can suddenly make it stick. Create a phrase from each letter of a word and turn it into an acrostic, which can be easier to remember than the word itself.

6. Because: Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants

 

Key Stage 2 (age 7-11)

1. Help with spelling.If your child is unsure about how to spell a word, encourage them to sound the word out and write the letter or group of letters (the grapheme) that represents each sound (the phoneme). You can help with any tricky bits as needed.

2. Play games.Many games are really useful for developing the skills that children need as developing readers. You probably already have a host of really useful games in the cupboard, so dig out the Scrabble, Bananagrams, Boggle or a crossword, to name just a few.

3. Play around with anagramsto help with patterns and spelling, e.g. make as many words as you can out of Constantinople (1697 apparently!).

4. Do simple crosswords.Do simple crosswords with your child using a dictionary to help you. The dictionary tells you what type of word you have looked up (verb, adverb, pronoun, noun etc.), and you can share this with your child. If your child is unsure about how to spell a word, encourage them to sound the word out and write the letter or group of letters (the grapheme) that represents each sound (the phoneme).

5. Highlight the hard bit. Frequently, there will be one part of a word that trips up your child each time. Look at the word together and highlight the part that they find particularly tricky.

   For example: night, separate , was, receive, weird, what, two, friend, said and cheap.

   Once you’ve done the highlighting together, get them to write out the word again without looking. This time they’ll be more focused on getting that tricky bit right, and will be able to remember how it looks.

6. Break it down. Try breaking down polysyllabic words to make each syllableeasier to remember. Help them decipher how many ‘beats’ or syllables there are in a word by clapping the word together, one clap per syllable. For example:

   Two-syllable words: Danger - Dan / ger, Windmill - Wind / mill

   Three-syllable words: Relation - Re / la / tion, Beautiful - Beau / ti / ful