- Read everyday for at least fifteen minutes. Practice makes perfect!
- Read low level, high interest materials. When your child reads less difficult text, it builds confidence, decreases reading related anxiety and improves fluency. Plus, by reading higher interest materials, reading isn't perceived as an assignment. This is the number one thing anyone can do to improve reading ability. Teen magazines and newspapers are a great place to get started.
- Read challenging novels to your child. This gives you a chance to read books to your child that he/she may find interesting, but that might be too difficult to read. By listening to you read, your child builds vocabulary and background knowledge and connects with the language. By spending this one-on-one time with your child, it is another opportunity for reading to be perceived as a positive experience.
- Reread books or articles. Reading fluency and confidence increases when your child rereads books and articles.
- Teach your child a difficult word-a-day. Larger vocabulary usually means better comprehension. Good readers usually have a larger vocabulary because they read frequently, thus increasing their comprehension. Have a family word-of-the-day that everyone uses, and remember that people must hear/use a word correctly more than 35 times to make it part of their vocabulary.
- Play word games such as Boggle or Scrabble. Word games are fun ways to increase vocabulary and spelling.
- Discuss books or articles that your child is reading. Summarizing is an effective way of checking for comprehension. Often poor readers don't realize that they didn't understand the reading. By asking your child to summarize, it makes her focus on her getting meaning from what she reads.
- Model reading. When a child sees you read, it shows him that there is value and pleasure in reading. As busy parents, we are often inclined to wait until the kids are asleep before doing something for ourselves. When it comes to reading, tell your child that you need your time too.
- Teach your child to preview. Before reading, get your child to scan the pictures, title, and pages so that she can predict what it will be about and look for words that might be too difficult. Your child develops a closer connection to the text. It also increases your child's focus.
- Teach your child to tackle difficult words. Often readers will skip a word that seems too difficult to pronounce. Through chunking and word association, almost all words can be deciphered. When you come to a difficult word, break it into chunks that you know. Then put the chunks together and sound them out. If there is a chunk that is difficult to sound out, try to associate it with another word that you know.
- Teach your child to make sense out of what is read. If he or she reads something that didn't make sense, teach them the importance of rereading in order to gain understanding of reading that was confusing. Most readers tend to keep reading even if something was not understood.
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