If you do one thing at home between Basic 1 and Basic 3, make it twenty minutes of reading a night. Not thirty. Not an hour. Twenty minutes, most nights, for three years.
I have taught Basic 1 here for eight years and I can usually tell within a fortnight of September which children are read with at home. It shows up in vocabulary first, then in writing, and by Basic 3 it shows up in mathematics too — because a child who cannot read a word problem cannot solve it, however good their arithmetic is.
Why twenty minutes
Twenty minutes is long enough to get properly into a book and short enough that neither of you dreads it. An hour of reluctant reading on a Sunday does less good than twenty minutes on four ordinary weeknights.
Consistency matters more than duration. Four nights a week beats seven nights one week and none the next.
What "reading with" actually means
It is not sitting your child down and listening in silence while they decode. At Basic 1 and 2 level, it is a conversation with a book in the middle of it.
Take turns. You read a page, they read a page. This keeps the story moving fast enough to stay interesting, and it lets them hear what fluent reading sounds like.
Stop and ask. Not comprehension questions — real ones. Why do you think she did that? What would you have done? What do you think happens next? A child who predicts is a child who is following the meaning, not just the letters.
Let them re-read. Children want the same book eleven times. Let them. Re-reading is how fluency is built; the eleventh reading is the one where they stop decoding and start performing.
Do not correct every word. If they say a wrong word that makes sense, let it go and see if they self-correct. If they stop dead, count to three in your head before you help. That three seconds is where the learning happens.
When your child does not want to
This is normal, and it is nearly always one of three things.
The book is too hard. If they are stumbling on more than about five words a page, the book is wrong for them, not them for it. Ask the class teacher for the reading level and take one step down. Reading should feel easy most of the time.
They are tired. Reading after a full school day, a bus ride and homework is a lot. Try the morning instead, or Saturday. Any twenty minutes counts.
They would rather choose their own book. Let them. Comics count. Football reports count. The back of a cereal packet counts. The goal at this age is a child who reads by choice; taste comes later.
In Ga and Twi too
Read in Ghanaian language as well, and let your child hear you doing it. Children who read in two languages read better in both, and it makes the Ghanaian Language paper considerably less of a struggle later on.
Storytelling counts as well. A child who has heard Ananse stories told properly has a sense of narrative shape that no worksheet will teach them.
What we do at school
Every child in Basic 1 to Basic 3 reads aloud to a teacher in a group of six at least three times a week, with a book matched to their own level. At half term we check every child's reading age and write to you if it is behind.
If your child is behind, they get four extra twenty-minute sessions a week until they catch up, at no extra charge. You do not need to ask for it and you will not be charged for it.
But twenty minutes at home, four nights a week, does more than any of that. It is the highest-return thing available to you, and it is free.
