Is your child struggling with reading? Don’t worry, reading and comprehension difficulties can be improved with practice. When your child learns how to read effectively, he or she can build skills that will enhance their reading and comprehension skills even further.
In this article, we will share with you ten tips to help improve your child’s reading skills:
Solve Mystery Words
While your child reads, he or she will encounter unfamiliar words. Instead of explaining directly what a word means, you can introduce clues to what the word means. Doing this regularly will enhance your child’s critical thinking skills that will help them have a more solid sense of the importance of reading comprehension. Encourage them to look at each letter to “make sense” of the word, rather than “guess”.
Encourage Them to Use Their Imagination
Encourage your child to use their imagination to create sentences using the words that they have read with you. It will help attach meaning to the way words look, helping your child quickly identify words. It also leverages context to connect words to the bigger picture of the sentence or story better.
Encourage Them to Read Aloud
Hearing them read out loud will help you understand their reading level. Reading aloud will also help you identify words or sentences that your child is struggling with so that you can help them.
Personalize Their Reading Time
Start getting creative and personalize your reading time with your child. Why don’t you ask your child to relate a personal story to you and write it down? Together, you can read it out loud, and this will help them with their speech, sentence structure, use of grammar, and connection to reading and writing. Stronger engagement often means quicker learning!
Provide Context
If your child is reading something that is totally new to them, provide a brief background and context about the topic if you can. By doing so, it will help ground the child in the reading ahead, and helps with word retrieval and word identification.
Discuss Important Words
Every topic contains important words to understand the story better. Discuss these important words ahead of time or as you encounter them so that they will be able to understand the story better as they read.
Have a Regular Reading Routine
Set aside reading time each day with your child. It will help increase their reading abilities in many areas. For younger children who haven’t learned to read yet, a daily story time routine will instill the importance of reading and introduce them to many new words.
Ask Them Questions
As you read, ask your child questions. It will help you know if your child understood what they just read and which areas your child still needs to work on. Open-ended questions are more impactful than questions that you can answer “yes/no” to.
Let Them Choose
Give your kids a chance to choose the books that they want to read so that they will be encouraged to read more. Also, when you let them choose the books that they want to read, they will see it as a cherished practice instead of a chore.
Always Encourage Them to Read
If you’re going on a long road trip or taking some time off to visit the dentist (or stuck at home during a pandemic …) why not ask your child to bring a book to keep him or her occupied? It will encourage them to read may help develop the habit of reading.
Conclusion
Reading is one of the best habits to instill in your child. Exposing them to reading early on is essential because it will help them develop strong reading skills to thrive in academics and life.
We aim to help parents with developing their child’s ability to speak and read. If you are looking for professional assistance to help your child improve their reading skills, get in touch with us today to see how we can help!