2600 minutes of reading (Ep. 35)

So I know for many, now we are getting quite the way through the academic year and we’re heading towards the summer season. But there’s something I’m going to bring up with us today. Which once you start looking at it you suddenly start to realize how much power we have as parents or families at home. Helping a child with learning to read.

So I have a little number for you here. 2,600 minutes, which actually makes a 44 hours a year spent on reading. This number, this is what we’re going to talk about. today because. What this number is, is if you take just 10 minutes a day, five days a week. And then multiply that by about the weeks. year. So 10 minutes a day is a recommendation they generally say when you’re first starting with helping a child learn to read, and this is a child having a go at reading, not the additional reading that you could be doing with your child.

So that is it 10 minutes a day. Which.

And sometimes it feels like it’s a lot. And at the times when you sat down and you get into it. Yeah. Oh, actually, that’s going quite quickly. Really just depend on the day. Doesn’t even little kids. But when you add that up, if you’re not even including the weekends.

That has 2,600 minutes, 44 hours. which does sound like a lot. You put it all that way. And that is a time that parents are actually spending with that child with learning to read. If you’re just spending the recommendation and when you get out so we can get into it, you quite often can do a lot more than that.

So let’s talk about this. Big number compare it to how much time your child will be spending with other adults as well.

So. Regardless of how your child is educated, whether they are in school or whether they are home educated.

And this is how they’re receiving their reading instruction. Parents are still spending more time with a child with anyone else. So maybe thinking, hang on. No, no, no, no, no, they, no. A teacher and a school is reading my child far more than I am. That’s not actually accurate because a teacher is unlikely to be spending that much timereading with your individual child.

So at the very early stages of learning to read in a classroom, when they are very much at the decoding stages and then you’d look to support with decoding.

A child will likely read with a adult about 10 minutes a week, one to one.

And that won’t always necessarily be the teacher it will also be a teaching assistant or another the adult who is in the room. Just so that you can get round all of the children. And that’s just the reality of it. There’s quite a lot of children in the class. Every child needs to be given the support to help them for their progress.

This is how basic this is how I set it up in my classroom when I was in reception is we take about 10 minutes per child. Read a couple of pages, do a little bit of reading work And that was at one-to-one. Listen to them, other means as well. So we were following a phonics program and that would be about 20 minutes, half an hour, each day in a group setting though. And although we were following a program, which would stream them into groups. Even with that, they were still quite big groups, really for the instruction that the children needed to receive.

If you’d calculate that then though, so it would be 10 minutes a week where the child 1:1 and then they’re in school for about 39 weeks a year. So if you times that. 10 minutes a week by 39 weeks the year. That comes to 390 minutes or six and a half hours. And then even if they had more than that, so they had 20 minutes a week. Cause I know some teacherswill spend more time and they will do two reading sessions with the child. But then kids get into a whole thing. Well, Yes. We’re spending a lot of time listening to them read, but. Are they getting a broad curriculum. Are we looking at all the other areas as well? If we are spending so much time on early reading.

That’s a debate for another day. But even if you doubled it would be 780 minutes or 13 hours in a whole school year. Sit with an individual teacher. Or adult, and I’m not even just send it to you. It’d be an adult who is in there. And so you compare that with the recommendation, 10 minutes a day with a child at home. That is a lot, lot more.

So that’s a huge difference. This is why the role of a parent is so important. For helping children at home, regardless of how your child is educated, it’s just how much more time you’ll spend reading. One-to-one with your child.

Once you start putting it into numbers like that it’s actually, mind-boggling like how much of an influence a parent is having on the child’s reading.

And yet I often feel that parents are not necessarily supported to know. That much about the reading process. we nod along and say, oh yeah, I know what you’re talking about. You’re using all this jargon. And I feel sometimes that schools and people working in education come across with knowing exactly what they’re talking about with reading. And we will in this, like, yeah, yeah. We know what we’re doing, but I’m going to be honest with you, a lot of people are guessing their way through it.

So we have such a huge role. In helping getting the reading milage in and helping a child with decoding and with comprehension and with all the other things that are going on reading. And is it huge role.

 Now another role that parents play a particularly big part is language acquisition. Now language acquisition is going to be a big part of helping a child with learning to read.

Now you might be thinking, okay. How does this all link? Now, one of the pillars of reading, which I’ve talked about previously is vocabulary. And a richer vocabulary makes it easier for a child to read because they have the understanding in their mind of the words ever to come across with them.

So again, parents are spending more time with a child with helping them aquire language and assimilate into the language. And have an understanding of how language is. And we’ve been working with them for much longer and will work with them longer than anyone else, because we start with it from birth and we get all the way through, their lives pretty much.

Another thing with this as well is studies have shown that young children who have parents support with learning to read are more likely to be successful. Now these come from studies. In 2018 by Butler and you line Carmichael. McDonald in 2014, Cosby and others in 2014 and Hartles in 2011, along in many, many, many more. If you are interested in that research, I can pop that in the show notes for you. And these are all from academic journals.

And I know sometimes it can be a bit heavy, so if you would like me to let them. I can do that for you in the show notes. But they have shown that the more parental support that children had in the early stages of life, the more successful they will be with reading. And it all links builds up that cultural capital that children are having at home.

If you’re reading to our children and with our children. So it’s not just, it can’t be just reading to a child. A child is going to need to be taught explicitly what all these symbols mean to make up this language and make it what reading actually is. The more support that we can give to that the better. And the studies have shown that their more likely to be successful and it is at the early stages where there is that fine line of how much support with reading? And when you start doing that and not pushing your children too much at the very early stages, but once there is a suggestion that you should be doing this 10 minutes a day. It is a good idea to start doing it. Because as we’ve shown, you have the potential to be spending far more time with your child with reading than anybody else.

So, if we say this and now we’ve talked about that role that you do have as parents and the families at home. And I say families at home as. I know it’s not just parents who are helping children with learning to read family makeup’s coming in lots of different ways and also it’s a lot of grandparents and other relatives and family members and friends, helping out with a whole village of raising a child, learning to read. So that’s why it is a whole network though. Isn’t it?

The adults that are helping with the child at home. It is important to have some structure. And this will look slightly different depending on how your child is educated. So with a lot of the instruction in school. The school will be doing a lot of the teaching of reading and the role of a parent at home is more of getting reading milage in and getting them used to reading and doing activities if you want to, to help support that.

But I do find, and I’ve had this where parents have got to a point where like, okay, I do need a plan. My child clearly is struggling because although I don’t want to compare them, they do seem to be not at the same level as their friends. Which then, it’s not even necessarily the same level as like national averages or whatever standards that are going against. I think it’s more when they’re not reading like their friends, that’s when children really, really feel it.

They come to me and they’ll say, well, what should I be doing? I don’t understand where they are on this whole journey. It all seems very complicated to me.

And having a structure and plan is important, but I know that it’s really difficult to work at all that it’s going to be. So, what I’m going to say to this now is I’ll link a couple of episodes in this, because I have talked about this before, of some of the things that you can be doing.

But identifying what it is that your child is struggling on their reading journey. When we’ve talked before about the simple view of reading and whether theyare at the decoding stage or the comprehension stage. Whereabouts are they , what is that they’re struggling? Did they miss out for whatever reason, a lot of the phonemic awareness stages of things because that formed a lot of wiring in the brain ready for reading.

I’ve seen it for, I think I’ve mentioned this in podcast before. Where children had missed early learning experiences . So there’s lots of things with knowing nursery rhymes. That language play that we do and the oral blending and oral fluency.

As I say, rhyming words, substituting letters, all that stuff that we should do in the mind. Before we even started reading.

But when children have missed sections that maybe because of illness, or other situations when we’ve gone back and actually looked at it and stuff to plug some of those gaps, it’s actually made quite a big difference for a child’s reading. So having a good think about where your child’s. Reading needs are. And you can always send me a message on Instagram @yourlearningvillage. If you need a little bit of help with that. I can send you some resources to help you with that. And then you can have a plan of where you need to go next.

So within that as well, one of the biggest questions that I always get is: what else can I be doing to help my child with learning to read? It doesn’t matter if you’ve been spending all the time reading to them. Doing flashcards with. Doing lots of different games. Had them in one-to-one tutoring sessions. This is still the question I get asked, what more can I be doing to help?

Now take away some of the things I’ve mentioned in this episode But I think understanding fully where your child is working at is one of the biggest points. Because children have a lot going on in the learning, learning so much about the world in such a short space of time. That sometimes we fill things with busy work that they don’t need to be doing and really targeting what is their unique needs can really help your child with reading. So understanding where they are on their journey. What support they need in terms of the five pillars of learning to read, having a good look at that. That will really help your child with reading.

If you are wondering what you should be doing next to help your child. With these 2,600 minutes that you’re spending with your child and more. Coming soon, we’ll be opening a special little village space. To help with learning to read at home. It’s a supportive environment, where we can create a full plan on how to help your child to support them with their reading and help you to connect with your child’s through reading. And using cooking as well if you choose to do that. Which will help you to create quality time and help them on their reading journey.

So what I’m going to share it with you. Now, if you are thinking about what should you be doing with your child, how can you be helping them to really get into this 2,600 minutes a year that you are spending with your child on reading. If you head over in your app for your listening, on the notes there, there’s a little link for you to follow to come and join a wait list for the little readers village. And inside the little readers village, we’ll be able to create a full plan on how to help your child and support them with learning to read at home. And that will be done through lots of different resources and access to me as well. And it helped you connect your child and this was a putting the love back into reading because we also have a whole bank of resources using the reading to cook method, which is my signature method, helping you too use learning to read recipes. And the thing that you helped with on that reading journey. So if you join the wait list, you will get a special discount when the village opens and there’ll be a few extra goodies on there as well. So I head over to your podcast app and you can find the link in the description of it there, or you can go to Instagram at yourlearningvillage, send me a DM with the word wait list. And I can also sort you out that and we can also have a little chat about how your child is getting on and any support that you think you might need.

Today we talked about the 2600 minutes a year you spend helping your child with learning to read. And that parents spend more time with their child than anyone else, regardless of how they are educated. That parents can have a crucial role in language acquisition. Studies have shown that young children who have parental support would lend to it or more likely to be successful. That it’s really important to have a structure and plan to help you to move your child on through their lending tree journey. And the biggest question that I always get is what else can I be doing to help my child with learning to read?

I heard that you found that useful today and you can go and spend those 2,600 minutes a year with your child on reading.

Happy reading with your child and happy learning at home. Have a great day, everyone.