Lara Lake PS students and their teachers LOVE BOOKS and LOVE TO READ! We have vibrant and inviting classroom libraries that contain a wide range of fiction and factual texts for our students to read and enjoy. Your child may even have a ‘bedroom library’ at home.

We explicitly assess and teach our students how to constantly improve their reading. As a learning community, we have very high expectations of ourselves as educators and of our students to constantly strive to reach their learning potential.

Reading is a meaning making process. As an adult, we read to gain information to successfully get through our day; we use a variety of skills to comprehend/understand what we are reading. Many studies have shown that the best way for students to become better readers is to READ! That makes sense, doesn’t it?

A large component of our Reading Program at Lara Lake PS consists of Independent Reading where students are engaged in reading Just Right books. ‘Just Right’ books are not too easy but not so hard that the students do not understand what they are reading. It’s certainly OK to read easy books sometimes and to also read something more challenging sometimes if the students are really interested in those books or magazines, etc., but the majority of their reading should be something that the students understand. It’s ok that there will also be some slightly challenging parts.

Your child may bring home books that seem too easy or too hard. That’s ok. Research shows that reading ‘hard’ books TO children improves their comprehension skills as well as increasing their vocabulary. If children are sometimes reading books that are too easy, their fluency will be developing. They may read the same book multiple times (“I can read this book with my eyes closed!”). Research shows that regular reading of the same text, sometimes referred to as ‘echo reading’, improves reading skills and knowledge. The more words that students read, the more proficient readers they become.

When listening to children read, PAUSE, PROMPT and PRAISE.

Pause: After the reader makes a mistake, you pause for around 3 seconds and say nothing. This allows time for them to read on and / or self - correct. This is really important, as to ‘jump in’ straight away and correct the reader’s error actually prevents them from self-correcting, which is a vital strategy that good readers do.

Prompt: If the reader doesn’t self–correct offer a prompt. E.g. Get the reader to re-read the sentence, provide the beginning sound of the word they are stuck on, help them to sound it out, or possibly re-read the sentence yourself and stop at the word, asking ‘What would make sense’. If this does not work, then it is OK to ‘tell’ the reader the word. Try to get into the habit of prompting first however.

Praise: Encourage the reader by praising the fact that they have had a go at a difficult word, finished a page, had no or few errors, read fluently etc. This is probably the most important thing that parents can do to support their child’s reading.

There are 3 main reading strategies children use when they are reading and encounter an unfamiliar word:

Strategy 1: Read On: Ask the child to read on to the next full stop. Often the meaning of the unknown word can be worked out through the child working out the meaning of the sentence. For example, if a child was reading aloud the following piece of text and did not know the bold word, reading to the end of the sentence might help them:

It hopped across the grass and Ava wondered where her pet rabbit would go.

The child might be able to work out the word hopped by the clues ‘pet rabbit’.

Strategy 2: Picture Clues: Ask the child to look at the illustration to see if they can work out any clues as to what the unknown word might be. This is particularly important with beginning readers, where the pictures in the book will often support what the text is about. NEVER cover up the pictures as by doing so you remove a key strategy for the reader.

Strategy 3: Sound Out: Ask the child to look at letters and work out the sounds. This might be the beginning sound or letter clusters that make a sound (e.g. ‘sh’, ‘tion’, ‘ead’ etc.) This could also be small words within larger words (e.g. ‘attention’. Sounding out individual letters is not always the most efficient strategy. Try to sound out the word eight. English sounds and letters have a one to one match only 12% of the time!

Note that one strategy is not more important than the other. Efficient readers use all the strategies all the time during their reading and are able to draw upon the best strategy for different situations.