Ways Parents Can Help Their Children with Reading at Home

Environment

• Provide a quiet, comfortable, well-lighted place for your child to read
• Provide a “no TV time” when your child can read without distraction
• Take your child to the library to check out books regularly
• Read aloud to your child regularly
• Listen to your child read regularly

Specific Strategies

Fluency

• Read to child to model fluent reading
• Encourage joining in on familiar/repeated parts, phrases and words during reading
• Encourage rereading familiar texts to gain fluency
• Demonstrate and reinforce reading punctuation
• Demonstrate and reinforce reading with fluency and expression

Comprehension

• Before Reading
• Preview story and make predictions with your child
• Help child make links to his/her background knowledge

During Reading

• Help child make prediction using illustrations
• Help child make predictions of story events and ending
• Demonstrate and reinforce when the child notices that what he/she is reading doesn’t make sense, sound right and/or look right

After Reading

• Help child make links to similar stories
• Encourage and support child’s responses to books
• Provide opportunities to discuss characters sequence of events, problems and resolutions
• Provide opportunities to compare/contrast stories and authors, etc.
• Provide opportunities to analyze and critique stories
• Demonstrate and reinforce retelling of familiar stories

SOURCE: BSD – McGowan,Place. Wolz