When do you stop listening to your child read?

[emkana]

Dd1 is just six and in year one. She is a free reader now, so has finished with ORT at her school. I must admit that I don't listen to her read that much anymore, because she races through books by herself all the time, and from her talking to me about them I know that she understands them. But I still feel a bit guilty about it.

So when do you stop listening to them read?

Thanks flutterfree.

It is a mistake to think that reading is a skill like tying shoe laces for example, and that once a child has mastered it and can decode at a certain level, then parental involvement is not needed.

IMO a child of 6 should be allowed to read alone as part of their reading experience - at that age- and up to year 5 or later, parents should be actively involved.

Many children can decode words but need to explore relationships within the books they read, and practise prediction skills. These are the skills they will need at GCSE level, and the earlier they start to analyse books in a very simple way, the better.

When I was five, my parents bought me Wind in the Willows- which has some very hard vocabulary in it. They used to read it to me - and I still have the copy- now over 45 years old. It is touching to see words and sentences they underlined in pencil which were too sophisticated for a 5 yr old to understand, and for which they substituted other words when they read it to me.

It musthave done some good as I became an English teacher- so please don't stop reading to your children too soon- you need to make them love literature- not just be able to accomplish the mechanics of reading certain words.

emkana, it's more complicated with the two languages, isn't it? Dd is 6.5 now. I no longer monitor her reading in German. She reads fluently and devours books in German so I just leave her to it and she comes to me if she doesn't understand a word or phrase. Having read the teachers' comments on here though, I'm beginning to think I am not doing the right thing after all! She reads quite complicated books now - (10-11 year olds) because she was bored with easy readers but German is a lot easier to read (phonetic representation). I am not sure how many nuances she picks up on but the books seem fairly nuance-free to me!

TBH I was relieved that she no longer seemed to need to read to me in German, so I could focus more on listening to her read in English. Her English reading is on a lower level and I am still teaching her to read so she isn't reading chapter books yet. English is much more diff for a child to my mind because unknown words are often so difficult to pronounce and that's a lot of the work I do with her (unobtrusively) when I listen to her read in English.

I read to dd every night in English - a chapter from an English novel - Railway Children at the moment. She reads a book in English and then she can read to herself (30-45 minutes in German).

robinpud - how old is your dd? The one who is reading the Diary of Anne Frank?