Description

The Parent’s Active Listening Guide to Reading

The Parent’s Active Listening Guide to Reading helps parents who would like to learn how to encourage their child’s love of books. It combines useful advice with a fill-in worksheet full of questions that you can ask your child.

Modelled after my “Organise Your Notes” Worksheet, the Active Listening Guide to Reading has plenty of space for you to answer questions and build a strong bond with your child. You can print it out and write on it by hand or you can fill it out on your computer using Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader. That means that whatever option suits you best, you can be sure that you can make the most out of my advice!

This guide will help you to:

• Learn more about your child’s reading preferences so that you can find other books they might like.
• Encourage them to think more like an English Literature student.
• Improve communication with your child and strengthen your bond.
• Come up with ideas for book-related summer holiday and homeschooling projects.

What is Active Listening?

Active listening is a communication skill that helps you to show a person that they have your full attention. It involves giving them space to voice their ideas, asking them great questions and engaging with the conversation as well as you can! You can find out more information on active listening from MindTools.

The Parent’s Guide to Active Listening is designed to make you think deeply about this important communication skill. It requires a bit of work on your side. I do recommend that you ask your child questions about the book to help you fill in the worksheet. However, if you put in the work, active listening will come easy to you in no time!

Why Should You Build Your Active Listening Skills?

As a parent, active listening is a vital skill. It helps you to create a strong, lasting relationship with your child and make them feel like they can talk to you about anything. It also helps your child to become more successful by showing them that you value what they have to say. That helps to grow their self-esteem and makes them more confident in their academic abilities.

I find that people with great active listening skills give great gifts, too! You don’t need to spend hundreds or thousands on a gift for your child. For most children, I’d say that a cheaper, thoughtful gift means way more to them in the long run. Thoughtful gifts show your child that you pay attention to what they want and need. That’s something that active listening skills can help you with!

If you’re a teacher or tutor, active listening can help you a great deal, too! It helps you to learn more about your student, such as their favourite media and the subject areas they feel unsure about. When you take this information and use it to shape the lessons you make, you end up with classes that could stick with them for the rest of their life! That is why this Active Listening Guide to Reading could be a great help to you, too!

How to Fill in the Worksheet

It is up to you how you choose to fill in the worksheet. You can print out a high-quality version and use a pen to fill in the blanks. Or, you could use a PDF programme like Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat to type in the answers to your questions. Then, you can print out the filled-in worksheet for future reference!

When you view this Active Listening Guide to Reading on a PDF programme, you will see blue squares where you can fill in the information. Don’t worry about these! They are just there to show you where you can type. They do not appear on the printed version! However, the information that you type inside the squares will appear in any print-outs you make, so please be aware of that.

You may fill in or print out the worksheet as many times as you would like. I recommend using the “save as” function to save different versions of the worksheet. That way, you don’t need to delete all of the information each time you start again.

Copyright Information

Copyright © Shani’s Tutoring. All rights reserved.

This worksheet must be used for personal use only.

The only exception to this is for teachers or tutors with a valid and up-to-date Teacher Distribution License for the month when they distribute the worksheet. In which case, please follow the rules laid out on that license.

Please note that all digital products on Shani’s Tutoring follow the Shani’s Tutoring Copyright notice. To find out more about your rights to Shani’s Tutoring intellectual property, please see my dedicated page.