As the number of children leaving school unable to read well shows few signs of falling, now is the time to harness the power of parents to support their children's education and schools, especially in reading. There is evidence to show that children whose parents help them with reading perform better in school than children who do not have that help.
Many parents have said that they have neither the confidence nor the skills to teach their child to read. The Teach Your Child to Read at Home programme is designed to deal with both of these issues and is aimed at parents with children aged four years or older who are starting to learn to read, and children up to 10 years old who can read but need to improve their reading. Research has shown that with the right kind of support parents can become excellent reading tutors for their children, even if they are not good readers themselves.
The Teach Your Child to Read at Home programme shows parents how to tutor and what to do and say every step of the way as their children go through a series of carefully designed and structured reading lessons.
There are two parts to the approach - Tutor Training, for parents, and Learning Guides, for children and parents.
Children start by learning to read the words they are most likely to see in children’s reading books. The learning process is broken into very clear and short instructional steps. By Lesson 2 children will be reading sentences, and by Lesson 7 they will be reading stories. The sentences and stories have been carefully written to include only words children have already learned or words they can decode. As a result, they are always successful and learning is quicker and more effective.
Parent Training is delivered through interactive text and an on-line seminar. The Tutoring methods introduced are research-proven and designed to help parents teach reading professionally. The Lesson Guides show parents what to do and what to say every step of the way. There is also on-line support available.
Parents who sign up for the programme get the support and guidance they need to teach reading professionally, including whole word and phonic approaches, comprehension and spelling, and also how they and their child can have fun with the learning process.
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We aim to make it easy for parents to teach their children to read well or help their children improve their reading at home. Our training and learning guides show parents how to teach their children to read well and want to read themselves.