Literacy Skills at home

How to help your child develop literacy skills at home

Reading

Good reading helps to improve a young person’s ability in speaking and listening and writing. It is therefore vital to their future achievement.

You could try some of the following:

Encourage your child to read for at least 20 minutes a night.
Let your child see you reading and talk to them about it.
Listen to your child read aloud as often as possible.
Encourage your child to use the school or local library regularly.
Discuss stories they are reading at school – the plot, the characters and what they liked about the story.
Help your child to build their vocabulary by encouraging them to look up words in a dictionary.
Remember that magazines, comics, short stories, poetry or information about an interest or hobby, favourite films and TV programmes also provide practice in reading skills.
Reading may be set for homework. Reading accurately for understanding will help them learn across all subjects.
Help your child recognise good revision skills by discussing with them what helps them learn and test them when they may have a test to prepare for.
Proof reading is a vital skill. Encouraging and helping your child to carefully check their written homework will help them spot any errors in their work.

Writing

Your child will be expected to write in many different forms from stories to poems to newspapers to reports.

Encourage them to take pride in the quality and presentation of their work by asking to see it and praising success.
Help them check their work carefully and help them recognise ways to improve their work and point out any errors you spot.

Spelling

Encourage your child to use these ideas to help them become confident:

Use a dictionary.
Look Say Cover Write Check
- Look at the word and see how it is spelt.
- Say the word.
- Cover the word.
- Write the word.
- Check the spelling is correct.
Split words up into parts to make learning the whole word easier eg. Into syllables – re-mem-ber.
Look for words within words
- For example, since and rely together make sincerely.
Congratulate your child on their efforts and success
- We learn from mistakes so use this as an opportunity to encourage them to try still harder.

Speaking and Listening

Children need to develop skills to contribute to formal and informal discussions.

Discuss your child’s work with them. Explaining their work to you will strengthen understanding of their studies will also improve along with their oral skills.
Encourage children to recognise that we all speak in different ways for different purposes. This will give them confidence in all kinds of situations from interviews to being confident when meeting new people.
Speaking homework is set regularly and your child may be asked to prepare a talk to give to their class. Being an audience offering positive advice can really build your child’s confident in this area