This is extremely common and it can happen even to children who read aloud beautifully. Decoding and comprehension are different skills. Sometimes the words are decoded but their meanings aren't known; sometimes the child is reading so word-by-word that the sentence never comes together as a whole idea. Build comprehension by talking about text like ask what's happening, what might happen next, and what in the story makes you think that? Grow vocabulary by explaining new words as you meet them. And keep reading richer books aloud. Note that hearing fluent, expressive reading teaches how ideas connect.

Because the curriculum changes. In the early years, most of the work is decoding, and texts are short and heavily supported by pictures. From Year 3, children are expected to read longer passages independently and understand, infer and remember text with less picture support and far more unfamiliar vocabulary. A child who was ‘fine' can hit this wall not because they've gone backwards, but because the demands jumped. The fix is usually vocabulary and comprehension practice, plus making sure fluency is genuinely automatic.

Rote copying of a weekly list rarely sticks, because English can't simply be ‘sounded out'. The same sound has many spellings. What works better is teaching patterns and word parts rather than isolated words: word families (light, night, fright), common prefixes and suffixes, and a few reliable rules. Use ‘test–study–test' so effort goes only to the words your child actually gets wrong. Keep sessions short and spaced across the week rather than crammed the night before, and make it multisensory (say it, build it with letter tiles, write it, check it). If spelling stays stubbornly resistant despite good teaching, mention it to the teacher.

A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a word. ‘Unhappiness' is three: un- (not), happy, and -ness (a state of being). Teaching children to see these parts is one of the most powerful spelling and vocabulary tools there is, because meaning-parts stay spelled consistently even when the sound changes (the ‘sign' in ‘signal', the ‘magic' in ‘magician'). Once a child knows a base word, they can read, spell and understand a whole family of words at once. This becomes a major focus in the upper primary years, but it's well worth starting now.

Fluency grows through re-reading and modelling. Try echo reading (you read a sentence with good expression, then your child reads the same sentence back), choral reading (read the same text out loud together), and simply re-reading a favourite passage a few times until it flows. Poems, jokes, and readers-theatre scripts are great because re-reading feels natural. Keep the texts at a comfortable level as fluency practice should feel easy, not like a struggle.

They can be, if they're used well. A test that simply ranks children and moves on doesn't teach much. But the ‘test–study–test' cycle, a quick pre-test to find the tricky words, focused study on just those, then a re-test is genuinely effective. This targets effort where it's needed and spaces practice out. If your child aces the Friday test but can't spell the same words in their own writing a fortnight later, that's a sign the words were memorised for the test, not truly learned and a signal to teach the underlying pattern instead.

First, take the pressure off as children can sense our worry, and it makes reading feel like a chore. Let them choose their own material, even if it's comics, joke books, footy magazines or the same book for the tenth time. Try ‘high-interest, easy-reading' (hi-lo) books that feel grown-up but read easily. Keep reading aloud to them (yes, even now) and use audiobooks alongside the print. Celebrate small wins like a paragraph, a page, a chapter rather than measuring. Reluctance is very often a mismatch between the book and the child, not a problem with the child.

Inference is ‘reading between the lines' like working out what the text implies but doesn't say outright. For example, if a character slams a door and won't speak, we infer they're upset. It's the comprehension skill upper-primary children most need and the one NAPLAN-style questions lean on hardest. Teach it through everyday conversation about texts, films and even people: ‘How do you think she's feeling? What makes you say that?' Always push for the evidence. The same ‘what in the text tells you that?' habit you used in earlier years now does heavier lifting.

Keep it low-key and skills-focused rather than test-focused. By Year 6 children are expected to find the main idea, make inferences, understand vocabulary in context, and justify answers with evidence from the text. Practise those skills through normal reading, not drills. After a chapter, ask ‘what's the main idea here?' or ‘why did the author include this bit?' If you do use practice papers, treat wrong answers as interesting (‘let's find the part of the text that gives the answer') rather than as failures. Confidence and a calm approach matter as much as content.

The short answer is ‘no’ and persistent spelling difficulty at this age is worth taking seriously rather than accepting as ‘just how they are'. At this stage the most effective approach is word study built on morphology: teaching the base words, prefixes, suffixes and word origins that explain why words are spelled as they are, so your child spells by understanding rather than memory.

Occasionally, yes as it's a quick, revealing check. If your Year 5–6 child reads aloud haltingly, ignores punctuation, or reads in a flat monotone, fluency may not be as automatic as it looks, and that can quietly cap comprehension. You don't need daily read-alouds now, but sharing a page, a news article or a recipe from time to time lets you hear how they're going and keeps reading a shared, positive thing rather than a solo chore.

Vocabulary at this age increasingly comes from reading and from meaning-parts. Keep exposing your child to rich texts like quality fiction, non-fiction, and read-alouds slightly above their own reading level. When you meet a new word, don't just define it but connect it to words your child already knows and point out the parts (‘transport, transfer, translate — trans means across'). Knowing common Greek and Latin roots unlocks huge families of subject words in science and the humanities. Talking with your child about ideas, using precise words yourself, matters more than any worksheet.

Stamina grows the way fitness does — gradually and with buy-in. Find a series or topic they genuinely love and let momentum build across books. Set a gentle daily reading time (even 15 minutes moves the needle enormously over a year) and protect it from screens. Audiobooks paired with the print text are a legitimate bridge, not cheating as they build vocabulary and stamina while easing the decoding load. Model it; a household where adults read tends to produce children who read.