Miss Wolfe's Kinders Rock!

     Reading With Your Child

Reading and talking with your child each day is one of the best ways you can help them as a learner.  Reading to them is, as you do with the Read to Me Talk to Me books, helps them primarily with comperehension.  The poems and songs that come home are meant to be read with your child to build confidence and to enjoy language.  The small group reading group books are sent home for your child to read to you.  Below are some tips for you when listening to your child read.

When your child gets stuck on a word:

When your child comes to a tricky word, you may see them look at you, appealing for you to supply the unknown word.  This is a behavior we would like to eliminate, or see only with very tricky words.  When your child comes to an unknown word, they should be encouraged to try and do some of the strategies listed in the right-hand column on this page.  These are decoding strategies.  Your child should say the beginning sound of the word immediately.  I often prompt children to “jump on it.”  They should begin to slide to the end of the word, stretching out the sounds they hear.  We don’t want them to linger long on any one word, so if they have not read the word yet, they should try the sentence again.  Beginning the sentence again gives your child a “running start” at reading through the word.  This helps them think about the context of the text as well, which will help them read the unknown word. 

Chunking the word, or looking for familiar parts they know immediately, is another strategy that readers can use.  This is a more efficient way of tackling unknown words.  As children become familiar with letter patterns or chunks of words, prefixes and word endings, this strategy becomes very efficient.

At this point in the school year, children should only be using their finger to point to words when the text becomes tricky; maybe there are several tricky words in a section, or there is more text on each page than they have read previously.  Another time for them to use their finger is to break words into parts by framing chunks of the word, or to cover up known parts of the word and focus on the unknown part of the word.  Prompt your child to “make their eyes do the work” when you see them over-using their finger as they read.

Helping your child become a more fluent reader:

Beginning readers are often very focused on each word.  Their reading sounds like a robot talk.  We want children to read fluently; the words need to be phrased and sound like talking.  They need to pay attention and use the punctuation, just as a driver uses road signs. 

If your child sounds as though they are reading word by word, often encouraging them to read more quickly will help them achieve more fluent reading. 

Helping your child build reading stamina:

Beginning readers need to build stamina.  It takes great focus to read.  Children are integrating many different decoding strategies, recalling word wall words, and thinking about what they read.  Keeping reading sessions short, ten to twenty minutes, is important.  Taking time while reading to pay attention to the illustrations, photographs, or diagrams, is also another quick way to give readers a break from reading the words. 

Most importantly, encouraging your child as a reader by praising what they are doing well, supporting them through tricky parts, and reminding them to read every day will help your child  become more independent and confident as a reader.