Celebrating Your Child&#039;s Reading

Celebrating Your Child's Reading

It helps us develop empathy - the ability to stand in someone else's shoes and understand their thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Reading helps us manage stress - regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels and higher self-esteem than non-readers.
Reading improves our relationships and friendships. Social situations are complex and sometimes difficult to navigate, but reading fiction can help us develop skills and understanding in this area.
Reading expands and improves our vocabulary and the better our vocabulary, the more able we are to access the curriculum and the better we do at school.
Reading expands our life experience. Our brains react to stories as if we are actually living the events we are reading about. This means that from your desk in the classroom, you can travel to anywhere in the world and experience almost anything!
And most importantly, reading makes us happier! Many studies have shown that people who read regularly, report feeling happier in general than those who don't.

Parent involvement in their child’s literacy is reported to be a more powerful force than other family background variables – including social class, parent education and family size.
Research has shown that talking to children about what they are reading, and having books and magazines at home make a difference to children’s progress even if parents have problems with reading themselves.
A recent study has found that children who were reading to their parents hugely improved their reading skills, even if the parents could not read in English or any other language.

Reading with expression – say it like you mean it. For example, read this sentence aloud but with emphasis on different words: ‘I never said she walked home.’
Making the punctuation audible – let me hear the full stop. For example, use the commas to pause for effect: ‘I looked, I turned, and I ran.’
Re-reading difficult passages or parts they stumbled on – read it again.
Working out what an unfamiliar word means by reading the rest of the sentence and looking for clues.