Does reading accurately mean a child can understand and recall what they’ve read?

For those of you whose children can already read, it’s vital to make sure they understand and remember what they’ve read. That’s the purpose and joy of reading. Many children ‘slip under the radar’ at school, because they can read the words on the page accurately. But a great deal of these children do not have any understanding or a recall of what they have just read.

That may seem unbelievable, but it is true. In fact, in the last many years, we have seen not only children but adults, who have very poor reading comprehension. Some reading programmes offered at schools only focus on a child’s reading accuracy skills, what are often known as decoding skills.

It is important that children learn to recognize sight words (i.e. high frequency words that are hard to sound out e.g. ‘are, the, when’) – this gives them some immediate success in reading. Once about 30 or so sight words are mastered (remembered), children then move onto sounding words out. Ultimately, once they master this skill, they can in theory, read any word they are presented with. But just being able to read words doesn’t mean you’ll be able to retain what you’ve read. If you are not making sense of what you’ve read, there will be no joy in reading - reading will be a purely mechanical task. Some children who struggle to master the mechanics of reading, put so much effort into that task, that they do not have any mental space to retain what they’ve just read. Children who retain what they’ve read, make images in their mind of what they read, as they read. You can encourage this, once they have some basic mastery of the mechanics of reading, by asking questions about what they think a character or a place looks like. See if they can paint a picture, with their words, of what they are reading.

Let me know how you go.