Reading with a child who can already read

The short version

Most parents stop reading aloud once their child can read alone. That is the moment it starts to matter most.
A few minutes a day does more than a long session at the weekend.
It does not have to be books. Comics, recipes, football programmes and magazines all count.

Why keep reading to them?

Because your child can understand a much harder book than they can read.

A seven-year-old can follow a story with proper jokes in it, and characters who lie, and a plot that takes three weeks. What they cannot yet do is get through the words fast enough to enjoy it. If you read it to them, they get the whole story.

That is where a love of books comes from. Not from the reading book with the school logo on it.

There is a second reason, and it is more practical. Books are where children meet words that nobody says out loud. Words like ancient, reluctant, furious. Reading aloud is how those words get into a child's head.

How long, and how often?

A few minutes a day. The Department for Education's advice puts it exactly like that: just a few minutes a day can have a big impact, at any age.

Daily beats long. Ten minutes every evening is worth more than an hour on Sunday, because it becomes a habit rather than an event.

If you miss days, miss them. This is not a streak to keep up.

What if they don't want to read?

Very common, and usually fixable. Try these, roughly in this order.

Let them choose, even badly. A child reading a comic they picked is reading. A child refusing a novel you picked is not. Choice matters more than quality here.

Let them read things that are too easy. Adults do this constantly. Nobody reads difficult books every night. A book below their level, read for fun, is doing real work.

Change what counts as reading. The government's own list is broader than most parents expect: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, comics, magazines, recipes. If your child will read the football results and nothing else, start with the football results.

Leave things lying around. Put something interesting on the kitchen table and say nothing about it. This works far more often than it should.

Read the same book yourself. Then you can talk about it. Children take books much more seriously when an adult is genuinely interested in the story rather than in whether they finished it.

Talking about the book

This is where reading turns into understanding, and it takes no preparation.

Some questions that work:

What do you think is going to happen?
Why do you think she did that?
Would you have done the same?
Has anything like that ever happened to you?
Did anything surprise you?

You do not need to do all of them. One good question is plenty. And if the answer is "dunno", let it go — this is a conversation, not a comprehension test.

Start with the cover. Before you open a new book, look at the front and guess what it is about. It costs nothing and it gets a child thinking about the story before the first sentence.

Making it easier to do

The main thing that stops bedtime reading is the room being uncomfortable or the book not being to hand.

Keep the books where the child is, not on a shelf they need help to reach.
A book light means they can read after lights-out, which is a surprisingly good motivator.
A bag for library books stops them being lost, which stops the fines, which stops the trips stopping.

Use the library

It is free, and it is the cheapest way to find out what your child actually likes.

Buying a book blind is a gamble. You spend money, the child reads two pages, and now there is a book in the house that everyone feels bad about. A library lets you get eight books, keep the two that work, and take the rest back with no hard feelings.

🔒 Which is why we would use the library first and buy afterwards — including for the boxed sets linked above. Find the series your child loves for nothing, then buy the rest of it.

Most library services also lend ebooks and audiobooks for nothing. Audiobooks count. A child listening to a story is doing most of the things a child being read to is doing.

Bring it off the page

Reading sticks better when it connects to something real.

Cook something from a recipe you read together. Let them read the instructions out.
Act out a scene, badly, with the wrong voices.
Look up the real place or animal from a book.
Make your own book, with photos from a day out and captions your child writes.

None of this needs to happen often. Once is enough to make the point that reading is for something.

And a word about our games

Word games are not reading, and we would rather not pretend otherwise.

What they are good for is the bit that sits underneath reading — noticing letter patterns and getting comfortable with unusual spellings.

Crumb Hunt is a word search, so it is about spotting words inside a grid of letters. Crumbword is a crossword, so it is about vocabulary and clues. Both suit primary-age children. (Our other crossword, Crumb Crossword, is a harder one aimed at eleven and up — worth knowing before you sit a seven-year-old in front of it.)

That is a supplement. The bedtime book is the main thing.

What if English is not the language you read in at home?

Read in your own language.

The government's advice is explicit about this: if English is an additional language, encourage reading in the child's first language as well as in English. A child who reads well in one language finds it easier to read in another. What you must not do is stop reading with them because you feel your English is not good enough.

Where this comes from

10 top tips for parents to support children to read, Department for Education, last updated 25 April 2022. This is where the "few minutes a day", the wider list of what counts as reading, the talking-about-books questions and the first-language advice come from. ⚠️ That page is old and shows it in places — one tip still refers to libraries reopening after the Covid closures. We have used the advice and not the dates.
The Reading Framework, Department for Education, July 2023, for what happens after a child can decode.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

About us

And who we are: CrumbJar is a British puzzle-games studio. We make daily word and number games that children and adults play on a screen, and the games are free. So we have an interest in you thinking well of screens, and an interest in you buying things through our links. We would rather you knew that than found out.