At Home With Kids: Reading

Being stuck at home can be an emotional rollercoaster, especially with kids. But, coming together through reading can be a great way to bond and chill with your kids. No, honestly!

Being at home with the kids can be a great chance to help them brush up on their reading. Whether it’s snuggled up in a blanket fort, reading the back of a cereal box together, fairytales before bed time or via subtitles on their favourite sesame street youtube video, it all counts! You don’t need to have any form of structure to incorporate it into your day, just be mindful enough to cease the moments that you can, to learn. Children who are read to from an early age tend to do better when they get to school.

If trying to maintain some form of home school routine is proving impossible, don’t stress it. I’m lucky, that my two are under 5 and so am not being held accountable for fulfilling any kind of structured, daily routine. We currently live in a continuous state of chaos. But rhyming, singing and telling stories together is just as good a way to help keep up your child’s mental activity as all other learning combined. And will keep them mentally stimulated until it’s time to go back to structured, school life.

Tell Stories

Telling stories is just as important as reading them. If you’re feeling a bit blocked on creativity then just discuss your day. Talk about all the things you’ve done together and how you feel. It’s a great way to understand how your child is feeling, but will also help with inspiring imagination and coming up with things you can do or read the next day.

Search For Books Online

We can’t visit our local libraries at the moment, but you can still have fun looking for and through books online. We love the Book Trust and using our Kindle to download eBooks.

Sing

Singing is a great way to teach children phonics, by helping them to understand the sounds of letters and words, which in return will help them with sounding out new words when reading. The Alphablocks on CBeebies is great for this.

Read Everything!

It’s so easy to get stumped on what to read, especially with limited resources. But there are words everywhere and teaching your child to read is a skill that will be utilised beyond bedtime stories. You can read:

•Recipes

•Magazines

•Instructions on boxes

•Movie subtitles

•Signs

•Mail/Leaflets

•Blog posts like this

•The news

•Twitter

•The contacts list on your phone

•Karaoke

•Text messages from close friends or relatives

The list is infinitive and as soon as you inspire your child to start reading, they’ll find endless things for you to read together.

The key to all of this though is to have fun and use it as a tool to help you all get through learning in isolation together. If you struggle at first then stop, move on to another activity and try again tomorrow. There’s no rush and you’ve got time to learn together at your own pace. So, just have fun!

Happy Reading!

Love,

Berrit x

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