Scholastic's 2015 Kids and Family Reading Report - and word 'skipping'

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Scholastic's 2015 Kids and Family Reading Report:

http://www.scholastic.com/parents/resou ... ing-report

Ideally it would be great if parents kept reading aloud to their children throughout their infant and junior years - and also that children keep reading aloud to their parents throughout their infant and junior years even when they are considered to be 'free readers' and capable of reading to themselves.

Of course they should also read silently, privately to themselves - but how many teachers and parents are aware of the issue of children 'skipping words' when they read to themselves?

Even many literate adults 'skip' the longer, more technical and perhaps new words when they are reading silently. But the difference is that literate adults would be able to come up with a pronunciation for the words they tend to 'skip' if they had to.

Children will encounter many new words in books which are not in their spoken vocabulary.

But if the children are not decoders or not good decoders and encouraged to decode every word - and to be curious about the meaning of new words - then they are likely to 'skip' a worrying number of words.

If any reader does not come up with a pronunciation for new words, then those words cannot add to their stock of words. They may even get the gist of the text whilst skipping the words, but their vocabulary is not enriched if they are not able to both decode the word and understand its meaning.

When anyone reads aloud to another person, they slow down, think about the meaning of what they are reading, and cannot just 'skip' words that present them with a challenge to decode.

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

More from Scholastic about reading aloud at home:

http://www.scholastic.co.uk/readingrepo ... ud-at-home

[Lucy Prabhu]

This is a really interesting report and has given me a bit of food for thought about types of books for my children to read; fun and laughter are definitely higher on their list of priorities than they were for me as a child (I loved adventure and mystery). It's very revealing in the report that a lot of older children still love being read to by their parents, even after they become independent readers.

My reluctant reader (aged 12), although able to read to himself and aloud, still prefers being read to. So we do, in the hope that it's helping his vocabulary and writing/grammar (his imagination is without bounds already!) and because it makes him very happy. When he reads to us he still skips little words sometimes so he still needs the practise.

Thanks for posting the link.