Early Reading Phase

Early readers confidently read familiar texts. When meeting new texts they may read slowly and deliberately as they focus on the printed word, trying to read exactly what is on the page. Early readers express and justify their own reactions to texts they have read or listened to.

Early readers will benefit from a range of experiences. Consider any of the following suggestions.

• Read to your child every day. Early readers benefit from hearing ‘good’ readers. This is also an opportunity to share and discuss information presented in texts.
• Encourage your child to choose texts to read on a daily basis.
• Expose your child to a wide variety of texts and give them encouragement to read new material, e.g. books by a new author, a different type of text such as poetry.
• Give encouragement and praise whenever your child chooses to read.
• Ensure your child sees other members of the family reading, and talking about their reading.
• Talk about characters, people, settings, plots and events in texts.
• Encourage your child to express their opinion about texts and to justify their reactions.
• Point out and discuss common words with your child.
• Encourage your child to try different ways to work out a word they don’t know: predicting by using clues, skipping the word and reading on to the end of the sentence, re-reading the sentence etc.
• Encourage your child to talk about how the meaning of an unknown word was worked out or could be worked out.