What you can expect
9–10 year olds know what ‘good readers’ do
By now, your child is aware of the reading habits and behaviours of ‘good readers’ and will have strategies to learn how to apply them correctly such as rereading a sentence or paragraph and looking up the meaning of a word they don’t know
9-10 year olds can read short novels
Your child should now be reading books that have only a minimum amount of illustrations as she can now imagine the plot in her head. At this stage, she will be adept at reading unfamiliar content and should be growing in confidence with new vocabulary.
9-10 year olds are reading texts silently
Your child should by now have stopped reading texts aloud and should be a fluent reader. If your child is reading silently you should ask questions on the text to check their comprehension.
9-10 year olds are meaning focused
Your child should now be able to decipher meaning almost automatically.
9-10 year olds have developed inferential skills
Your child will have learned to interpret both literal and inferential meanings. Literal meaning is going for the simple, most obvious meaning and inferential meaning is where you have to ‘read between the lines’ or where the meaning is interpreted rather than stated obviously.
9-10 year olds can analyse a text
Your child will no longer simply just read a text, she will also be able to examine it at length and understand how it can be viewed from different perspectives.
9-10 year olds can construct an overview of what they read
Your child should now be able to take the key ideas from a text and understand how these are linked to the overall message.
9-10 year olds can find the meaning of unknown words
Your child can now use a dictionary or thesaurus to uncover the meaning of an unknown word. This will help her to learn new vocabulary.
9-10 year olds are using multimodal texts
Multimodal texts are texts that have more than one ‘mode’. They may have written text, images that are still or moving and also incorporate sound. Your child may be reading multimodal texts in the form of internet sites, software, DVDs and emails. These texts are a great opportunity to develop her visual literacy skills and engage her by giving her the chance to read real life texts.
