How to help your child develop their reading skills in Year 2:
- When your child is reading aloud to you, encourage them to use the pictures, the rest of the sentence and phonetic clues to read words.
- Point out the punctuation in a sentence, e.g. full stops, speech marks, exclamation marks.
- Take turns in reading longer stories .
- Discuss your child’s favourite words and phrases.
- When reading non-fiction books use the contents page and index to find information.
- Talk about the main event and compare it to your child’s own experiences, e.g. Remember when we went to the beach…
- Talk about the main character’s thoughts and feelings.
- Point out obvious story language across a range of books, e.g. ‘All fairy tales start with Once Upon a Time…’
- Re-read stories and poems so that your child becomes very familiar with them and can retell them.
Fiction:
- When and where did the story take place?
- Which word tells you that…?
- What did…do?
- Which words tell you about the setting?
- What do you think is going to happen next?
- What do you think will happen at the end of the story?
- What is your favourite part of the story and why?
- Why did the author use that word?
- Can you retell me the ending of this story?
- Can you find any words that rhyme?
Non Fiction:
- How can we find information in this book?
- What features can we use?
- What is the glossary for?
- What is the difference between a fiction and non-fiction book?
- How does the picture help us to understand?
- Why is there a label/ caption with the picture?
- Why does each page have a heading?