| | Hearing
Your Child Read  For
an 'untrained' parent, hearing your child read can be a very frustrating experience.
John Bradford gives some helpful advice
Reading with your child at home can easily become
very stressful if it is not handled correctly, and can cause great frustration
if you feel that your child is not learning to read as fast as you expect, or
if you have discovered that your child is Dyslexic. This article will set out
some guidelines which have proved extremely helpful to many parents.
The first point is to realize that reading a book together must be for pleasure,
and is not the time to be stopping over difficult words and trying to work out
what they say from the sounds of the letters.
If your child cannot read
a word within a second or two, just tell them the word and move on with the story.
This goes against most parents' instincts, but is the only way for the two of
you to get on with the book and enjoy the story. When you read the book again
the following evening, you will find that your child remembers more of the 'difficult'
words you had to supply, and will improve each evening. The important thing is
that your child is learning to be confident that you will always tell them a word
which they do not know, and can trust that reading with you will be a pleasurable
experience.
Unfortunately, the alternative scenario is all too well-known
to us all: your child sees a difficult word, tenses up and makes a frantic effort
to work it out. Meanwhile, you also tense up, feeling that your child will never
learn to read!
Because of the history of the English spelling system,
which has grown from lots of different sources, many words are impossible to work
out from the sounds of their letters.  'Cat'
is straightforward, as are 'log', 'hit', and 'get'. But what about words like
'though'? The spelling has no resemblance to the actual word that we say, and
no-one can possibly know what the word says unless they are told. No-one can work
out how to read words like 'said', 'early', 'was', 'phone' and thousands more
from the sounds of their letters. Unfortunately we have inherited a highly irregular
spelling system which we are stuck with!
However, with the growing confidence that you will always tell them a word they
do not know, children do learn to read. You will notice them using other
clues, like the pictures on the page, or guesses from the meaning of the sentence,
and it is good to encourage them to use these clues. Provided that they have the
opportunity to go over the same book on different evenings, they will gradually
come to learn the new words in it, and to enjoy the story - which is what reading
is all about!
Another simple method to make things easier is to share
the reading with your child: read one sentence each (while still coming in straight
away with any difficult words for your child). This will teach your child to look
out for the next period/full stop, and will help them get an idea of what a sentence
is.
Repetition of the same phrases also helps tremendously in the early
stages, when your child knows that the same sentence will be repeated at each
stage of the story. 
Books which are ideal for regular repetition
are 'Chicken Licken' (who thinks the sky is falling down!), 'The Enormous Turnip',
'The Three Billy Goats Gruff' (with the troll under the bridge!) and 'Goldilocks
and the Three Bears'.
Your child should be working out words by the sounds
the letters make, but this should be a totally different activity, quite separate
from reading a book together. It can be done as a game with the words being written
on little cards, and there are examples in my article The
sounds the letters make.
The Golden Rule is to tell your child
the word they do not know, and the moment you feel yourself tensing up, just switch
over to you reading to your child for the next few pages until you feel
a bit more relaxed.
John Bradford
1999 Does
the Golden Rule work?
Many teachers and parents have told me what a difference they saw in a dyslexic
child when they began using this method. It has to be accepted that confidence-building,
which emanates from this method, and learning go hand in hand with a dyslexic
child. This is why the Golden Rule is so successful. One teacher wrote to me that,
after reading to her using this method, her pupil 'left me with far more of a
bounce in his step!' and wanted to take the book to read at home.
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