Tips for Helping Your Child Become a Better Reader
“Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.”
--- Horace Mann (1796 - 1859)
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
--- Groucho Marx
Create a Fluency Friendly Environment
- Listen to your child read often (every day)—It is the most important action you can take to reinforce and improve your child’s reading!
- Consistency is the key! Make it a regular part of your day.
- You can both read, taking turns, by paragraph, page, or short chapter.
- You can read it first and have your child reread it to you. Encourage him or her to read with expression and pause for punctuation.
- Ask your child to choose one or two words and
- attempt to tell what it means based on how it is used
- connect it with images based on how it sounds or other words it is similar to
- look it up in a dictionary. Online dictionaries are fine.
- use it in a sentence
- give a synonym and antonym for the word
- brainstorm other forms of the word
- Challenge your child to be a word detective by hearing or seeing the word (or forms of it) used during the next 24 hours
- Assist your child with dissecting words into prefixes, suffixes and Latin and Greek roots. (Dictionaries are a good source for information). The following 4 out of 20 common prefixes are used 58% of the time:
- Un- (not)
- Re- (again)
- In-, im-, il-, ir- (not)
- Dis- (not)
-
- En-, em- (put into)
- non- (not)
- In, im- (in)
- Over- (excessive)
- Mis- (bad)
- Sub- (below)
- Pre- (before)
- Inter- (between)
- Fore- (earlier)
- De- (reverse)
- Trans- (across)
- Super- (above)
- Semi- (half)
- Anti- (opposite)
- Mid- (middle)
- Under- (too little)
- Nurture the expertise of your child. The most meaningful vocabulary is that which is relevant and useful to our daily lives. Cultivate your child’s development of vocabulary in an area in which he/she is interested, be it a particular sport, dancing, a pet or animal, a place, a topic in an academic area (science, history, technology), or a hobby/recreational activity.
Support Reading Comprehension
While your son/daughter reads aloud to you, you can help with comprehension by when you ask him/her to:
- demonstrate active reading (see active reading strategies).
- Make a prediction using information known about the character, events that have occurred so far, and the type of story you are reading (realistic fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, science fiction, informational nonfiction, biography).
- Make a comment about how the author’s writing makes the story interesting (language, style) or how you feel or react to a character in the book
- Make a connection to previously read stories/information or to a personal experience/knowledge.
- Ask a question (about an unknown word, about something he/she wonders about, about something that is not understood).
- identify and talk about the facts: the “who, what, where, when and why” of the story.
- make inferences about the reading. Questions that ask why a character behaves a certain way (motive) or how a character is feeling usually require a degree of “reading between the lines” or inferential reasoning.
- list some words that describe a character. Make sure the list includes words that describe a character’s personality as well as the physical appearance.
- use imagery or visualization while reading. You can ask for your child to verbally describe a particular passage. This is especially helpful when reading a paragraph with a lot of descriptive detail (which readers sometimes tend to gloss over). It might be fun to have him or her draw a picture of an interpretation. A short caption underneath these chapter drawings can also reinforce these images.
- summarize the main ideas of a chapter or paragraphs he/or she has just read.
- describe the plot, what happened and his or her feelings about the book when it is completed.
