The first way in which parents can help their children is by being involved in the choice of text. During Reading for Pleasure students choose their text and consultation is not required. Parents might have a good idea which types of texts might hold their child’s interest or have read them already themselves and could recommend specific texts. Parents and students completely starting from scratch could do worse than to examine a site like Amazon on which a wide range of texts are reviewed.
Step 1:
Parent and student choose a text that both agree has a good chance of holding the interest. Take into account subject matter as well as recommendations regarding the difficulty of the text. The size of the text might also be a consideration: a short story might be considered more manageable than novel at first.
Step 2:
The student reads aloud to the parent for a previously agreed length of time or number of pages (agreed by student and parent). The parent listens in the same way that they did while their child was in primary school. There is absolutely no reason why this activity cannot continue to benefit students in secondary school, simply with more demanding texts.
Step 3:
While the student is reading, the parent casts their eyes down a list of generalised prompts. All prompts supplied here are informed by the Department for Education standards regarding reading progression. Parents should modify the prompts to suit the specifics of what is being read at the time (e.g. a prompt that regards character should be rephrased to include the name of the main character / a character that features in the section being read during the session). Prompts are organised according to the reader’s level of development. One or more prompts should be used from each level of development, starting with the first and moving progressively up through the levels in terms of difficulty. This should continue until the prompts become too difficult for the student to answer. Prompts from the lower levels of reader development should then be returned to in order to consolidate the reader’s confidence and the foundation of their understanding. Changes in the text mean that the task always changes, and therefore constitutes good practice, regardless of the nature of the task or the fact that it might it might have been used before. Prompts should be chosen for their suitability to what the parent has heard read.
Step 4:
Students should be asked to pause at the end of a sentence or paragraph and the parent use the prompt to ask the student a question. This forces the student to think about what they have read and use key reading skills like inference and deduction to respond to the text. The parent listens to the answer and perhaps might choose to push for more detail or greater depth in an explanation. Responses shouldn’t be written down and need not be delivered in a formal fashion. They should be verbal and fairly casual in order that the student not lose the thread of the narrative.
Step 5: After answering the prompt question and developing their answer, they should continue reading aloud. As the parent hears another opportunity for a prompt in the reading, they should stop the student at the end of sentence / paragraph and pose another question. This continues throughout the guided reading session. As many prompts as feels appropriate can be used during a single session but during certain sections (narrative climaxes, plot revelations, moments of suspense) the parent might consider it better to allow the student to complete a section without interruption. All of this will feel familiar to parents who regularly read with their children during primary school.
Regular guided reading sessions exercises the student’s analytical faculties, their textual comprehension and emotional responses to written material like a muscle. It doesn’t matter that some prompts might come up regularly but be applied to different sections or texts. Physical training and exercise is similarly repetitive but similarly beneficial. In their day book the student should record the name of the text they used for guided reading and what they read (e.g. Chapter 4, pp201-216). As usual, parents should initial the homework and identify the time spent on guided reading as part of the weekly total as the student’s proof that they have completed the appropriate amount of homework that week.
Guided Reading Recommended Reading List (including links to free ebook versions of the texts)
Guided Reading Prompts
