Tips for Reading with Your Child at Home
Reading with your children is one of the most important things you can do. It helps build their literacy skills and guides them along the path to becoming lifelong readers. Reading with your child is also a fun way to connect with one another and grow together!
If you are feeling less than confident about reading with your child, please don’t worry – there is no one right way to enjoy reading together as a family. That said, here are four tips that could help you develop your child’s reading skills at home.
Have conversations before, during and after reading together. Having conversations when reading with children helps them develop higher level thinking and language skills, such as predicting, problem solving, or contrasting. While reading books aloud, ask your child questions and talk about the content of the story together before, during, and after reading.
Help your child learn how to break sentences into words and words into syllables. Before children can identify letter sounds in words or reading, they can learn how spoken language can be broken down into smaller pieces.
Show your child that they can break down sentences into words. Practice identifying the words in a sentence by reading a sentence aloud and asking your child to count the number of words in that sentence.
Practice breaking words into syllables. A syllable is a part of a word that has one vowel sound. One or more letters can be the vowel sound, and a consonant may or may not come before and/or follow it. Here are three strategies that your child can use to identify the number of syllables in a word:
Place your hand under your chin and notice the number of times your chin moves down as you say a word.
Hold up a finger for each syllable as you say a word.
Clap your hands for each syllable as you say a word.
Help your child sound out words smoothly. Sounding out a word involves saying the sound of each letter or letter combination one by one until the end of the word, and then saying them all together again quickly. Help your child sound out words by:
Showing them how to say each letter sound in a word, starting at the left-hand letter and moving right, and then joining all the sounds together to form the word.
Stretching and connecting sounds together as much as possible.
Reminding your child to check their pronunciation after they connect the sounds together.
Ask if the word makes sense or if it is a real word.
Ask if they know the word that they said after saying the letters all together quickly.
If the word is not familiar, ask them to read the word again to make sure they joined all the sounds together correctly.
Model reading fluently by practicing reading aloud with your child. You can take turns reading continuous passages of a book, you can read the same passage of a book aloud at the same time, or you can read a passage of a book aloud and then have your child read the same passage aloud. Having children read aloud daily, both with and without feedback, helps them develop the skills of reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. Fluency is the ability to read a passage of text aloud accurately, at an appropriate rate, and with expression. When reading aloud with your child:
Model and provide feedback on proper tone, pausing, and which words to emphasize.
Set a slow, steady pace, slowing down for words that are challenging. Gradually increase the pace, moving on to more difficult books. Remind your child that reading fluently does not necessarily mean reading quickly.
Use familiar books. Make sure that the book is appropriate to your child’s reading ability. If a book is too difficult, children can develop poor reading habits.
Reading is definitely a family affair so I encourage you to try these tips at home. Ready, set, GROW!
“Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty. It should be offered to them as a precious gift.” ~ Kate DiCamillo
Adapted from: Tips for Supporting Reading Skills at Home. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, U.S. Department of Education.