What did the reading strategy involve?
For children’s literacy and language development, home-based programmes can be more effective than classroom interventions. Through group discussions, role-play and video demonstrations, parents were guided to support their children’s reading. This included: • observing and understanding the processes children use in order to make sense of a text; • offering activities for sharing oral language with the child, encouraging writing activities at home and using opportunities for discussing print to start discussion of letter sounds; • prompting the child to use visual clues or familiar sounds and letters to predict unknown words, or to help the child correct their own errors; • reading (or skim-reading) a book before a child does in order to cement the parent’s own understanding of key ideas; and • setting the scene for reading by introducing appropriate behaviour, such as switching off the television. These methods are a combination of literacy skills and behavioural habits designed to s
