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Here are some things you can to at home to help your child gain essential beginning literacy skills:
Practice reading daily. For younger readers, try 20-30 minutes a day depending on their age, ability, and stamina. THE SINGLE, MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do is to have your child read to you and give immediate feedback and encouragement DAILY!
Decades of research has shown that students who read more, read better. They develop better vocabularies, achieve higher levels of reading and writing development, and score highest on standardized tests. This is particularly true for students who have daily opportunities to read, year after year.
Phonics and decoding is essential to accurate and fluent reading.
Practice reading the same story several times. Accuracy and reading rate will increase with each reading of the text. This will help students to recognize words quickly. Additionally, repeated readings increase confidence and motivation. Encourage children to read both out loud and silently.
Increase how much reading your child is doing. The more time a student spends reading, the more accurate and fluent they become.
Practice reading to others: Students may enjoy reading to a parent, sibling, younger child, or a friend. I had a student once who read to her stuffed animals!
Motivation is KEY: Finding books that engage and spark the interests of your child is half the battle. Offer your child voice and choice. Ask a teacher or the librarian to help you find interesting, well-written books. The library is an amazing wonderful atmosphere to choose books. They even have books for sale for a quarter! You can teach financial responsibility at the same time as enhancing your child's reading skills!
Here are some additional things you can try at home to foster a life-long love for reading:
Have conversations before, during, and after reading together.
What skills will this practice help build?
Having conversations about what they are reading helps children build vocabulary and develop skills using language typically found in school settings. Building their skills to think and connect ideas from many contexts allows children to follow more complex language, which they might find in stories, instructions, and descriptions of historical events or nature.
Help children learn how to break sentences into words and words into syllables.
What skills will this practice help build?
Learning how to identify words in sentences and syllables within words helps children understand how to break down the sounds within spoken language. Identifying parts of speech—such as words and syllables—will prepare children to learn about smaller sounds tied to specific letters. These are skills that a child can practice even before he or she has started reading or identifying letter sounds in words.
Help children sound out words smoothly
What skills will this practice help build?
Recognizing and manipulating sounds that are part of words and linking those sounds to letters is necessary to prepare children to read words and understand what they are reading. Children must be able to identify the individual sounds that make up the words they hear in speech, name the letters of the alphabet as they appear in print, and identify each letter’s corresponding sound(s). When children know a few consonant and vowel sounds and their corresponding letters, they can start to sound out and blend those letters into simple words.
Model reading fluently by practicing reading aloud with your child
What skills will this practice help build?
Reading books daily, both with and without feedback, can begin as soon as children can identify a few words. It requires children to identify words quickly, combine ideas in the book with their background knowledge, ask themselves questions about their understanding, and apply strategies to help comprehension and fix misunderstandings. Then, children can connect with a variety of books of different levels and wide-ranging content.
For more information visit Reading Rockets https://www.readingrockets.org/literacy-home/reading-101-guide-parents They have parent-friendly information about how your child learns to read and ways you can enhance their reading skills just by involving them in everyday tasks.
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