Read all about it!
Helping your child improve their reading skills is easier than you may realize. Create a book-friendly environment and encourage your child to read each day, and eventually they should learn to love the written word!
Create a ‘printed word’ environment at home and let your child see you enjoy reading and that reading has a purpose. Read books, magazines, newspapers, recipes, letters, shopping lists, instructions, timetables, the computer – anything you can get your hands on.
Encourage your child to join in with reading activities
- Give him access to a wide variety of reading material, including story books, poetry, riddles and jokes, children’s magazines, comics, the computer, lists.
- For early readers put labels on objects around the house for example ‘door’ ‘stove’ ‘fork’ ‘spoon’ etc. Make labels for family names, pets and addresses.
- Make up labels or lists with your child.
- Use magnetic letters to write words on the refrigerator.
- Write simple instructions for your child to follow.
Enjoy choosing books together from the library or bookshop
- Explore the different purposes of books – fiction, poetry, non-fiction, reference.
- Use titles, cover pages, pictures and ‘blurbs’ to predict what the book might be like.
- Ask the more confident reader about his favorite author – he could compile his own anthology of his favorite stories and poems.
- Choose from a wide range of fiction including traditional tales, stories from other cultures, best selling authors, and books he’s been introduced to at school.
- Get him to recognize that certain types of books are targeted at particular readers – for example fantasy, junior science fiction, humor.
Continue to read to your child and make this a cozy relaxed time – even when he’s a fluent reader
- Make the experience interactive. Ask questions about the story, get your child to predict what will happen next. What does he think of the characters? Where is the story set? For older children, talk about the dilemmas facing the characters and think of different ways to tackle them. Link themes in books with his own experiences.
- Read poetry and rhyming books that play with language – for example, the Dr Seuss books.
- Find information in non-fiction books using the contents page or index.
Encourage your child to read out loud
- Early on, prompt him to re-tell stories that you’ve read to him. Encourage him to get the main points of the story in sequence. ‘What happened first? What came next? How did it end?’
- Encourage him to make up stories from pictures in books – some books are published without words for this purpose.
- Help him learn and recite simple poems and rhymes with actions.
- More confident readers can role-play characters in stories with you. Make this fun, changing the voice for each character. Look at how dialogue is written.
Top 10 teacher reading secrets
1 Spot the clues!
Help him be a detective and look for clues to unknown words in books. What’s happening in the pictures? What does he think a character is saying?
2 Focus on phonics
Start with the beginning sounds of words. Use letter blends as one sound, for example ‘th’, ‘sh’, ‘ch’. Later on, use the end or middle sound of a word to distinguish between similar known words. For fluent readers, break unfamiliar words into smaller chunks or syllables.
3 Shape up
Look at the shape of the word – do the letters go up, down? Does he recognize the shape of the word from before?
4 Cut it out!
Write out common words to learn, draw round the outline and cut them out. Practice reading them like flash cards.
5 Predict the future
What word does he expect to come next using his common sense? Most good school reading schemes use books where the text is predictable for a child. Given the confidence, children are usually right!
6 Go with guesswork
Cover over obvious or repeated words and ask him to ‘guess’ the missing word. This works particularly well with rhymes. Or skip the word and read on – read the rest of the phrase or the sentence. Can he work out the missing word?
7 See the stop sign!
Stop at full stops, start again at capital letters and pause at commas.
8 Come unstuck
Don’t get stuck on one word, otherwise the sense of the text will be lost and your child’s attention may drift. If h can’t figure the word out, help him and move on.
9 Share and share alike…
Read a sentence or a page each, or get your child to read a couple of pages and then read the rest of the chapter yourself. He can re-read the bits that you read at another time.
10 Enjoy!
Be patient and make it fun. Children learn to read at different rates and at different ages – for some kids it’ll suddenly click but for others it’ll be slow and steady. Giving your child confidence with plenty of encouragement and praise is the biggest help you can give while they’re learning to read.
Updated July 28 2008