SUPPORTING YOUR CHILD’S LEARNING in ENGLISH
- Engage your child in authentic and meaningful conversations with your child. Ensure they are looking at and listening to you as this happens.
- Correct, by modelling, any incorrect pronunciation and grammatical structures when speaking with your child.
- Review heart words (sent home on keyring).
- Engage in rhyming songs and games with your child. e.g. ‘hat and cat’, ‘tail and whale’ are rhyming words because they sound the same at the end.
- Reading or listening to nursery rhymes, songs and poetry.
- Draw your child’s attention to words that begin with the same initial sound. e.g. leg and lump.
- Clapping or tapping the syllables they can hear in words when reading together. For example, dog (one syllable – one clap), zeb/ra (2 syllables – 2 claps) and el/e/phant (3 syllables – 3 claps)
- Stretching some simple words into sounds, such as d- o- g, while you are reading and writing together. Make sure you say the sound, not the letter name
- Practise writing their own name using lowercase letters. For example, using brightly coloured pens and pencils on paper, chalk on concrete, flattened sand in a sandpit.
- Discussing the meaning of subject-specific words. For example, ‘volume’ in mathematics, ‘habitat’ in Science and Technology, and ‘artefact’ in HSIE (History)