Top 3 Common Mistakes When Reading at Home

Supporting your child with reading at home can be a challenge…especially when the way children are being taught at school is changing!

In fact, these mistakes have been common place for a long time, and it’s only recently that research has shown the best practice for teaching reading.

Avoid these 3 things to best support your child with phonics and reading.

If you find yourself reading this and hear yourself saying, “Oh no, I’ve been doing this!” don’t worry! It’s good that you have this information, and it’s not too late to start now.

✘ Focusing on the letter name

Yes, we know this is counter to our culture, wherein everyone, including well-meaning loved ones, points to letters and says names! But please know, this is far from being helpful and can cause confusion for young children when it comes to reading and spelling.

Traditionally, children were taught letter names like ay, bee, sea from the start. However, letter names don’t always represent their pronunciation – examples include double u or em – and this might confuse children when they try to pronounce words made up of these letters.

There’s a good reason for this. Think about it.

If you’re helping your child read the word ‘cat’, what’s more important?

The sound of each letter: ‘c-a-t’

Or the name of each letter: ‘see-ay-tee’

Kids look at a word and think of the names of the letters instead of the sounds.

Teaching children letter names can potentially slow down your child’s progress in the early stages of learning to read because the extra information increases the burden on their limited working memory.

✔ Instead, say the sound

Focus on ‘sounds’ rather than ‘letter names’, as the sounds will assist your child to read and spell words. How do you spell ‘bug’. Sound it out…’b-u-g’.

Tell your child that each letter has a sound as well as a name, but that they only need to say the sounds while they are learning to read and spell. Learning letter names will come once they’ve grasped this.

✘ Exaggerating the letter sounds

Don’t add additional sounds to the end e.g. “duh” instead of “d”

Again, let’s look at an example:

Sound out ‘dog’ - your child may read as “duh-o-guh”, and try to think of a word that kind of sounds like “duhoguh.”

✔ Instead: Use pure sounds

We use pure sounds when we pronounce each letter sound clearly and distinctly without adding additional sounds to the end.

Using pure sounds makes it much easier for children to blend sounds together to read.

Example of pure sounds

• sss not ‘suh’

• t not ‘tuh’

• p not ‘puh.’

• mmm not ‘muh’

✘ “Look at the picture for clues”

Or “Read on and see what word makes sense”.

Unfortunately, this way of teaching has been the most popular for decades, but this is a cueing system that has proven to be unsuccessful and fundamentally flawed.

Cueing guides children to use guessing strategies rather than decoding and phonics skills to read unfamiliar words. This can hinder your child’s progress.

Students who rely on these strategies struggle dramatically when faced with words in isolation or texts with no pictures.

✔ Instead: They need to decode the word

This is where using decodable texts in the early stages of learning to read is important. Read more about this here.

Decodable texts break students of these habits and force them to rely on their phonics skills.

If you think your child might be struggling, don’t ‘wait and see’ how they go.

It’s much more difficult to remediate reading difficulties in older students than in young ones, so the earlier the intervention, the better.

Raising any concerns with your child’s teacher is a great starting point. You can ask them how they’re supporting your child in the classroom, and ask for strategies to help your child at home.

Tutoring is an effective way to identify and target specific your child’s learning gaps, giving them a rapid boost.

At Attain Education, our tutors are primary specialists, which means they use teaching strategies that are used in the classroom. Our tutors can give your child the 1:1 attention that they can’t get in the classroom.

You can book a no-obligation call from one of our team to find out more about our Phonics Booster Sessions or ways our specialist primary tutors can support your child.