Two facts for parents who want to improve children’s reading at home: 

The 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that only 34 percent of US students were rated ‘reading proficient.”

A 2012 report by Renaissance Learning on 29,000 students showed that English 15 and 16-year-olds had an average reading age five years lower than their actual age.

The effects of a low reading age

In the UK, the reading age requirement for GCSEs is 15.6 – that’s the average age of students who sit them. If their reading age is well below that at the time of sitting the exam, it becomes frighteningly obvious they will not be able to understand the exam papers well enough to pass the examination or do as well as they should.

It also means that throughout their entire time at school they will have been struggling to read the texts books and worksheets handed to them by teachers. They will have had a consistently poorer understanding of the subjects they were studying than those who have better reading skills. So, even if they did manage to understand the exam paper, the knowledge they had to answer the question would have been inadequate to get them through.

This will no doubt have a negative effect on their futures. Having a low reading age stops children getting into college and university and prevents them getting better paid jobs. These children will be less competitive in the jobs market and will have increased chances of living in poverty as a result.

No-one want this for their children.

What can parents do at home to help improve their child’s reading?

According to Renaissance Learning, children make the most progress when they are reading challenging books for at least 35 minutes a day. Less than that and the progress is smaller. The single most important thing you can do as a parent, therefore, is to get your children to read more. We all know, however, that this is easier said than done and the older the child, the harder it is to do, especially if they are really starting to read for pleasure for the first time.

Here are some useful tips to get you on your way:

1) Find how much time your child already spends reading

You should have an idea if your child reads at home and how much time they spend doing it, but you can add to this how much private reading (i.e. reading a book of their own choice for pleasure) they do at school. For example, in my last school, every child between 11 and 14 read privately for an hour and a half each week during school time. This would mean that at home they would only have to read for 22 minutes a day to reach the 35 minute a day goal.

2) Explain to your child the benefits of reading

Explain to your child why you want them to read at home and the benefits they will get from it. This is not just about improving their reading age but also about the telling them of improvements it will bring to their lives in the long run. It’s also about the benefits of reading good literature and the brilliant adventures they can experience when getting into a good book.

3) Find suitably challenging books for your child to read

Finding a suitable book is not as straightforward as it seems. The first thing you need to know is your child’s reading age. You should be able to get this from your school, but don’t count on it! Not all schools have well organised reading schemes where there is regular testing of students’ reading ages. However, if they do not have your child’s reading age ask for an assessment to be done.

If you can’t get it from school, an excellent test to use is the Burt Reading Test.  Originally created in 1974 and since updated, this has been used extensively as a way to help understand a child’s reading age based on their ability to read increasingly more demanding vocabulary. What it doesn’t do, unlike the Renaissance Reading tests, is give you a reading age based on the child’s ability to understand the meaning of texts. However, it will help as a guide to get you started. You can download both the guide and the instructions here.

Burt Reading Test Guide  Burt Reading Test

Only once you have the reading age can you begin to find suitably challenging books. If your child has a reading age of 10, then giving them books with a reading age of 8 will not benefit them and similarly, giving them a book with a much higher reading ages will be too difficult to help them progress. As a guide, in order to make the best progress, children need to be reading books that have a slightly higher reading age than they are currently working at. From here, they can then move to more challenging books as they progress.

4) Find children’s books with suitable content for their age

The big issue comes with the discrepancy between the real age and the reading age.  A teenager with a low reading age might find it difficult to find an interesting book. No teenager wants to read childish content. Similarly, a seven year old with a reading age of 14 might find books that are a little bit inappropriate for their age and maturity.

Where to get help finding the right books

Renaissance Learning runs a program called ‘Accelerated Reader’. Unfortunately, it’s only available to schools, not to parents. However, there is a free tool called the AR Book Finder.  Here’s what to do:

• Go to the tool
• click on advanced search tab
• select the ‘Interest Level‘ for your child’s real age
• select the ATOS book level for your child’s reading age. (For example, a book level of 4.5 means that the text could likely be read independently by a pupil whose reading skills are at the level of a typical fourth year pupil during the fifth month of school.)
• click search

If you leave the title and author boxes blank, the results will show you all the books that match both your child’s reading ability and are suitable for their age. The results will also include an image, a  rating from other readers and a brief description.

What else do you need to do?

Encourage and support

 Help them choose a book:

• show them it’s cool to read by finding out who their heroes are and what they are reading
• go to the library with them
• sit down together and check out book reviews on Amazon
• buy them a book as a present
• Find alternatives to paper books which might engage their interest more. See our post: Why Older Children Don’t Read & How To Tackle It for a possible solution to this.

Talk about books you have read which they might be interested in or get them the book version of their favourite film or TV series.

Remember that 35 minutes a day may take some time to achieve. It doesn’t all have to be done at the same time either – it can split up over a couple of sessions. If your child is finding hard to focus for so long at first, don’t worry, just give it time.

Whatever, you do, don’t leave it too late before you start your 35 minutes a day routine. Perhaps you can join them and read at the same time? Acting as a role model is one of the best ways to improve children’s reading at home.

In the current educational system, your children are taught to read using phonics or, to use its full name, systematic synthetic phonics. This method uses a very different approach to teaching reading than that which most parents will have experienced when they went to school. For that reason, many parents feel very much in the dark and out of their depth when it comes to helping their own children to read using phonics. For that reason, I’ve put together a parental guide to phonics and how young children are taught to read in schools so that you can begin to understand how phonics works and how you can help your children to read at home.

What is Phonics?

The word phonics derives from the word for sound. The words: gramophone, microphone, telephone and even the band name, Stereophonics, are all sound-related words. Phonics is the practice of teaching children to match sounds to letters and from there to teach them to ‘blend’ the sounds together when they see a combination of letters in a word so that, when they say them, they pronounce the word correctly.

For this reason, teachers are more focused on teaching the sounds of the letters rather than the name. For instance, when they teach the letter Z they are taught how to say ‘zzz’ rather than its name ‘Zed’ (UK) or Zee (US). Instead of teaching the alphabet, ‘ay, be, see, dee, he, ef, gee,’ they would teach ‘ha, buh, kuh, duh, eh, fuh, guh.’

By teaching duh, ho, guh, rather than dee, oh, gee, it is hoped children would soon be able to associate and blend the sounds to say ‘dog’ when they see the three letters together.

Please note that the way I’ve spelled the phonics sounds is only a guide to how they should be said, there is no actual way of writing the sounds down accurately: to find out how they really should be pronounced you need to watch the video below from the BBC series, Alphablocks. The sounds the characters say in the video are the ones you need to teach your child. For those of us brought up to learn the alphabet by saying the letters, it can seem quite odd at first – but this will be how your children are taught at school and if you want them to be able to find learning phonics and reading at school easier, you can help by teaching the method in the video below.

Phonics terminology and why you need to learn it

Once you have got your head around the basic principle underlying the teaching of phonics, the next thing you need to be aware of is the terminology used to teach it. One reason why you need to learn this is because your children will be learning it too and these are the terms they will understand when you help them at home. Despite the fact that your children are still at a very early stage in their actual reading, these challenging and technical words will be part of the everyday vocabulary they will be using in lessons. Using these terms at home when teaching your children phonics will reinforce the learning they do at school and make sure you are communicating accurately.

Phonics Terms

Below are the main phonics terms you will need to know together with an explanation of what they mean.

Phoneme

In basic terms, a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. Usually, a phoneme represents the sound of an individual letter spoken out loud, but sometimes it can be a sound that represents more than one letter as in the sound ‘uh’ the middle of book, or the ‘eye’ sound in the middle of night. The English language uses around 44 different phonemes, I say ‘around’ as there are debates about the actual number, some insist the number is 42.

Grapheme

If a phoneme is the sound, the grapheme is the letter or group of letters printed on the page that represent the phoneme. Using the example above, if the word is night and the middle phoneme is ‘eye’ then the grapheme that represents it is, quite simply the letters ‘igh’.

It is worth pointing out here that there can be several different graphemes associated with a single phoneme. The sound ‘eye’ for example, can be used in the words ‘by’, ‘bye’, ‘lie’, as well as ‘night’. So, the phoneme pronounced ‘eye’ can have the written graphemes ‘y’, ‘ye’, ‘ie’ and ‘igh’.

You can see from this that there is a downside to phonics when it comes to teaching spelling: whilst it can make reading easier to learn, the number of possible graphemes to choose from can make spelling more of a challenge. For the 44 phonemes in the English language, children need to learn many more graphemes in order to spell them all. There is some considerable debate over the numbers, some conservative sources state there are around 130 graphemes whilst others say there are as many as 461. However, even at its lower end, you can still see how children can become easily confused.

Segmenting and blending

Segmenting is the term children are taught to mean the breaking down of words into individual phonemes when trying to spell (they find breaking into sounds easy, the difficulty, as mentioned above, comes with matching the correct grapheme to the sound). When teaching a child to learn a spelling using phonics, the first thing you need to do is to get them to segment the word into its phonemes and then write down the corresponding grapheme. If they choose the wrong one, then you may need to point them in the right direction.

One of the difficulties with English, particularly with spelling, is that many of the words in the language are imported from other languages. Words beginning with the letters ‘ch’ are a good example. Used as in champagne, with a ‘sh’ sound, the origin is French, used as in chaos, with a k sound, the origin is Greek. This means that there is really no uniform spelling pattern which links sounds to letters, hence the larger number of graphemes in comparison to phonemes.

Blending is the term they are taught when putting individual phonemes together to pronounce a word when reading.

Digraph

Digraph is the term used to describe a single phoneme that in written form is made up of two separate letters.  For example, the ‘oa’ that comes in the  middle of ‘coal’ or the when ‘s’ and ‘h’ come together to make ‘sh’ as in ‘show’. In addition, if both the letters are made from vowels this is called a  vowel digraph, where they are both consonants they are called consonant digraphs. 

Trigraph

A trigraph is when three letters represent a single phoneme, as in the ‘igh’ in ‘night’ or ‘eau’ in beautiful.

Split digraph

Split digraphs are one of the most difficult phonetic concepts for children to understand, but they are so common in the English language they will not be able to read fluently until they have grasped the concept – so it’s vital that they learn this quickly and using the split digraph terminology to do so.

Most parents will grasp the concept quickly if I refer to it by it’s old nickname – the magic ‘e’. Basically, if you add an ‘e’ to the end of a word it changes how you would pronounce the word, or more precisely, how you would pronounce the previous vowel in the word.

The word ‘fat’ when pronounced has the phonemes ‘fuh’ ha’ and ‘tuh.’ However, if you add an ‘e’ on the end to make ‘fate’ the letter ‘a’ is now pronounced ‘hay’ instead of ‘ha’. The letter is the same, but the phoneme is pronounced differently because of the addition of the magic ‘e’.

In phonics, this is called a split digraph, because it combines the ‘a’ and ‘e’ to make the digraph ‘hay’, but the two letters are split up by the ‘t’.  Other examples of split digraphs include ‘life’, ‘rate’, ’tile’, ‘hope’ etc.

You can tell when a child has not grasped how to pronounce split digraphs because instead of  reading fate as ‘fayt’ they will say ‘fatty’. Here, they are saying the ‘a’ and ‘e’ as separate phonemes instead of a single one.

Abbreviations

Teachers are renowned for using abbreviations and this is apparent in the teaching of phonics. However, there are only two you need to be aware of and these are easy to grasp: C for consonant and V for vowel. They are used to show children the pattern of consonant and vowel graphemes in written words. So CVC stands for consonant – vowel – consonant as seen in the word ‘big; and VC, vowel – consonant is seen in the word ‘each’ (remember although ‘each’ has four letters, it has only two graphemes ‘ea’ and ‘ch’ as the grapheme is a written version of a phoneme and some phonemes, digraphs and trigraphs, can be made of more than more letter). There are more complex patterns of vowels and consonants in words, children encounter these as they move on to longer words.

Phases of Phonics Teaching

The teaching of phonics is divided into six phases which usually begin as soon as children begin school, sometimes phase one is even taught in preschool. The first phases are very basic but soon begin to get increasingly complex as children’s reading develops. Although most children learn at a similar rate some children will develop at a quicker pace to others.

Also note that children who have learned to read before they get to school may not have learned using these skills, so whilst they may be fairly fluent readers and reading itself may not be difficult for them, learning phonics will be something they have to start from scratch. Learning new terminology and techniques for this way of reading is likely to be as challenging for them as every other child, indeed, it might make it even more difficult for them if they have already trained their brains in one way of learning words.

There is also some concern in academic circles about whether there is any need to teach phonics to children who can already read by the time they get to school. Some believe it can hold these children back. From a personal point of view, my eldest daughter could read fluently, without phonics, by the time she started school and whilst it’s been a new skill for her to learn, I don’t see it has been of any benefit to her at all. Whilst she could not phonetically blend words she did not know, she was quite capable of blending syllables by herself if she was unsure of how to pronounce a word. I can’t say for definite that it has held her back, except to say that all the time spent learning phonics could have been better spent on developing other literacy skills. In contrast, my youngest daughter could not read more than a few words by the time school started, yet by the time she got to the end of reception year the phonics system had helped her massively, she can now read exceptionally well for her age and constantly uses blending to help her when she is stuck.

I can’t say for definite that it has held her back, except to say that all the time spent learning phonics could have been better spent on developing other literacy skills. In contrast, my youngest daughter could not read more than a few words by the time school started, yet by the time she got to the end of reception year the phonics system had helped her massively, she can now read exceptionally well for her age and constantly uses blending to help her when she is stuck.

Phase 1

Phase One focuses on developing a child’s speaking and listening skills and is designed to familiarise children with everyday sounds in order to get them ready to blend and segment phonemes. Phase 1 has seven stages all of which involve: tuning into sounds and being able to look at similarities and differences between sounds; listening to and remembering sounds and patterns of sound; talking about sounds and learning new terminology.

Phase 2

Phase 2 is when children are introduced to letters, graphemes and their sounds. This is often done one phoneme / grapheme at a time in the following sets:

 Set 1: s, a, t, p

Set 2: i, n, m, d

Set 3: g, o, c, k

Set 4: ck, e, u, r

Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss

At this point, children will start  learning to blend and segment simple words usually three or four letters long. Alongside this, children are introduced to simple but irregular words where phonics cannot be applied to the reading and spelling. Children are taught to call these, ‘tricky words’ and they include such words as ‘I’ and ‘the’.

Phase 3

Phase 3 begins when children are at a stage when they are able to blend and segment words using the the graphemes / phonemes taught in Phase 2. During Phase 3 twenty-five new graphemes  / phonemes are introduced one at a time. these are:

Set 6: j, v, w, x

Set 7: y, z, zz, qu

Consonant digraphs: ch, sh, th, ng

Vowel digraphs: ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er

Phase 4

By the time students reach Phase 4 it is expected that children will be able to recognize all graphemes above, be able to pronounce them and in most cases be able to write them. During Phase 4 they will blend these phonemes to read CVC words and segment CVC words for spelling, doing so with increasing confidence.  At the same time, they should also develop the skills to read simple two syllable words.  Finally, they should also be able to read all the irregular words learned during these phases and be able to spell most of them.

Phase 5

In phase 5, children begin to learn new graphemes and where they exist, their differing pronunciations, for example, ‘ow’ can be pronounced differently depending on whether it part of  ‘sowing’ or ‘how’. It’s the complexity of the English language which can cause problems for children here – for ‘sow’ itself can be pronounced in two separate ways depending on whether one is talking about growing seeds or female pigs!

It’s at phase 5 where children begin to focus in on spelling. Using phonics again, they learn to spell by choose the right grapheme to represent the phoneme. This is why, when you read young children’s work, it often is spelled incorrectly, but when read phonetically, makes sense. This is because they have not yet grasped the right grapheme to choose.

 Phase 6

In phase 6, the focus is even more on learning spelling. Here they will be taught the rules for adding suffixes (endings) to words. This includes rules like adding ‘-ed’ to create past tense and -ing’ to create present tense, eg, walk becomes waled or walking. The main suffixes taught at this stage are:

-s           -es          -ing         -ed        -er          -est         -y       -en        -ful         -ly          -ment       -ness    

Teaching phonics at home

I would start off by showing Youtube videos, such as the Alphablocks one shown above that you can watch with your child to help them to learn the sounds and associate them with their graphemes.

Playing with things like foam bath letters and magnetic letters is another way to make learning fun. If you do this, make sure you start with lower case letters and not capitals, as these are where they will start at school. Mixing capitals and lower case letters can be confusing for a child so stay with lower-case until they know them all before moving on to capitals.

When you name letters or talk about them, do use the phonetic sound, rather than the name of letter. Ha, buh, Kuh, duh, eh, instead of  hay, bee, see, dee, he.

There are also some excellent resources available. Jolly Phonics is an educational publisher  who was recommended to me by primary literacy advisor. They have a fantastic reputation in schools for providing phonics resources to help children learn to read. Their catalogue includes: reading books, workbooks, flashcards, dvds, phonics sounds and graphemes wall stickers and even phonics song CDs.