Do you make your (older primary) child read aloud to you?

[KizzyWayfarer]

I’ve just read an email from our headteacher which (among other things) goes on about the importance of older children still ‘reading with parents’. But it doesn’t explain why, and I can’t see what they would gain as opposed to the risk of putting them off reading. If they’re happy reading on their own would you just let them get on with it? I guess we all look back to our own childhoods and I was a bookworm who certainly never read aloud to my parents once I could read.

[Changemyname18]

Please encourage your child to read out loud to you. I echo the sentiments above as even the most able readers are not always grasping the full meaning and/or reading too fast and mispronouncing words. It also helps extend their understanding of English. A bright kid can phonetically read almost all words correctly, but may be guessing at the meaning. This will help enormously with any 11 plus verbal reasoning if relevant. I've been a volunteer reading helper for many years, and remember being astonished by one child aged 8. One of the most able in the class, they read to me absolutely perfectly, but with no 'feel' for the story. Also, when we went back over what they had read and I asked them what several words meant, they had no clue whatsoever, and told me they didn't like to ask else they would appear thick. Learning the nuances and meanings of words is a lifetime skill, next time you check with your DC a word and ask them what it means, you'll often find it quite hard to give a clear definition yourself. So, please hear your older primary child read out loud.

[Kokeshi123]

My daughter is a bit younger than the kids being talked about here. But when she was reading about "life in the rainforest" to me today, she encountered numerous new words on the two pages she read--canopy, ecosystem, fertile....

If she was a couple of years older, she'd be reading a higher-level book and there would continue to be new words that she didn't know yet.

[brisklady]

'Classic' books often have new vocabulary. We've recently read the Secret Garden and there was plenty in there (along with Yorkshire dialect words that even I didn't know the meaning of!!). We're currently reading some Lloyd Alexander, and out of interest I've just opened a totally random page. On one double page we've got: bard, docile, skittish, rugged, canter, gait, defile (in the sense of rocky gully), ravine, outcropping and lolling. DS would have known some of those well, others vaguely but not precisely, and some not at all. As well as teaching new words discretely, reading together is also a great opportunity to talk about word derivations, which helps with future unknown words. So if you come across 'conspicuous' you can talk about the 'spic' or 'spec' bit of a word meaning 'see' like in 'spectacles', and that then equips your child better to decode 'retrospective' or 'perspective' or whatever other 'spec' word they might meet in future.

[TrumpsTinyCheesyWotsit]

I do not ask my kids to read aloud from the age 8-9. All of my kids have been very young readers and have massive collections of books. My youngest is ten now and she took 3 novels on a recent camping trip and read two Jacqueline Wilson's and The Meg over 5 days! She stops and asks me things at times, about context or subtext but she takes a great deal of enjoyment out of reading a book alone and then re reading it a few weeks later. In her own words, its like having fresh eyes and you see the things you missed the first time. I would hate to rob her of that! All my kids, even my teen boys and 20 year old daughter still read regularly for sheer pleasure ( as do I) so I am happy with that.

[Norestformrz]

"But it's quite unlikely that in the couple of thousand words that are read in 20 minutes of reading, that there are many" does it really matter whether they encounter one or a hundred new words in what they read

[TrumpsTinyCheesyWotsit]

Plus, we have dictionaries lying around the house too. I am a writer, and recently completed my MA and am starting a second degree, in STEM so we have lots of etymology, lexicon and liguistics stuff lying around. I love talking about it all with my kids and my 18 year old son has such a thirst for language based knowledge he has surpassed my research ( and his is just for fun).