The reading book that comes home every night
Ten minutes a night, says the school. What we had by half term was ten minutes of misery a night, four nights a week, and a child who had worked out that books were something that happened to her.
The sheet said ten minutes a night. It was in the front of the folder, in a nice font, and it arrived in the third week — about a fortnight after she started.
By half term we were doing ten minutes of misery, four nights a week, and my four-year-old had reached the conclusion — reasonably, on the evidence — that reading is a thing adults make you do after your bath while they sit slightly too close and say “well done” in a voice.
What was actually wrong
Not the reading. The scheduling.
We were doing it after bath, at about half six, because that was the slot that was free. Which means I had picked the single hardest cognitive task of her day and placed it at the exact hour when she had least left. She’d been at school since nine. She had been being good, in a room with thirty other children, for six hours.
Moving it to before tea got rid of about half the problem in one go, and it cost nothing.
Four minutes
We set a timer and we do four minutes, and when it goes we stop, even mid-page. Especially mid-page.
Stopping while it’s going well is the entire trick, and it is completely counterintuitive when you have a sheet in a folder telling you ten. Four good minutes builds something. Ten that end badly build a feeling about books that takes months to undo.
Perhaps a third of the time she carries on past the timer because she wants to know what the dog does. That’s the whole point of the timer. It’s not a limit, it’s a promise about the ceiling.
She’s allowed to say it’s boring
Some of these books are boring. That’s not a criticism of them — they are built to drill a specific sound, and a book that has to use “ch” nine times is going to be structurally compromised as literature.
For a few weeks I was defending them. Doing the bright voice. “Ooh, I wonder what happens next!” — about a book in which, demonstrably, nothing was going to happen next.
She could hear it. Five-year-olds have perfect pitch for adults being false, and every time I did it I was spending a bit of credibility I would need later.
So now I say it. “This one’s not much of a story, it’s for the sounds, we’ll do four minutes and then I’ll read you the one about the badger.” She agrees with this arrangement completely. She has never once objected to it.
Not every night
We do four nights out of seven, roughly, and we skip without comment when somebody is ill or when it has been a bad day.
For the first term I was doing it every single night because the sheet said every night, and what that produced was three good sessions and two that were genuinely awful, and the two awful ones dragged the whole thing down. She started dreading the folder coming out.
Four nights of not-dreading has produced more reading than seven nights of dread. That is not what the sheet says and it is what happened here.
The bigger thing
We read to her a great deal, and that was never in question and never became a battle, and I think it’s worth separating the two out.
The nightly book is homework. It is decoding practice and it is work and it is fine to treat it as work. The book at bedtime is not work, it is the best part of the day, and the moment those two things blurred into each other was the moment I nearly lost both.
Things people email to ask
- How long should a reception child read for each night?
- Shorter than you think, and stopping while it is still going well matters more than the number of minutes. School suggested ten and we do four, timed, stopping mid-page if the timer goes. Four good minutes builds more than ten that end in tears, and a child who is not dreading it will often carry on past the timer of her own accord, which is the whole aim.
- What do you do when a child refuses to read their school book?
- Change when you do it before you change anything else. We moved ours from after the bath to before tea and roughly half the resistance disappeared, because we had been asking a five-year-old to do the hardest cognitive task of her day at the point when she had nothing left. If that does not work, shorten it, and let her say out loud that the book is dull.
- Should you make a child read every single night?
- We stopped, and it improved things. Insisting on every night turned three good sessions and two impossible ones into five bad ones, because the two impossible ones poisoned the run. Four nights out of seven, skipped without comment when somebody is ill or wrecked, has produced more actual reading than the unbroken version ever did.
- Is it bad if a school reading book is boring?
- The books are built to practise specific sounds, so some of them are genuinely dull, and pretending otherwise costs you credibility with a child who can tell. We say so out loud — that this one is not much of a story and we are reading it for the sounds — and then read something good together afterwards. Being honest about the dull one protected her feelings about books in general.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
The week she started school
Nobody warned me about the fourth day. The first three were fine — she was fine, I was fine, everyone was fine — and then on Thursday the whole thing arrived at once, for both of us.
What we decided about screens, and how long it held
We made a rule in January that lasted until the second week of February. The rule that replaced it is worse on paper, has no numbers in it, and has now been running for a year.
Bedtime, in the order we do it
Not a routine we designed. A routine that assembled itself over about four years, and which I only wrote down because my sister asked and I discovered I couldn’t say it out loud in the right order.
Comments
They’re open, but they go through me first — every one is read and approved by hand, which is slow and occasionally very slow. Email is the fastest route, and I answer most of them.
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