Reading with your child is fun!

By now you and your child have tackled quite a few words found in their Game Books. You have given them strategies to use when he/she comes up on a word he/she doesn’t recall or doesn’t recognize. So what comes next? It’s time to read with your child. But before you begin you must remind him/her that reading is MORE than just reading words. It’s important that they listen to themselves so that when the story is over, they will know what it is about. Something I tell my young readers this:

            Imagine there is a miniature you sitting on your shoulder or hanging out inside your brain. That mini-you is excited that you are about to read them a story. That mini-you (You, I say pointing to them) must listen to the story. If you don’t listen, then the mini-you will be sad because YOU won’t know what all those words were about.

Analogy: It’s like baking a cake. The words are like all the things you put into a cake: flour, sugar, butter, eggs. “Just eggs” don’t make a cake and just one word doesn’t make a story. You must put everything together to get a cake or to get a story.

 

Before you begin, set some limits. Some children cannot read a whole book at one sitting. Set a watch or clock to 17 minutes. This is the amount of time you should let your child read if he/she is struggling. If he/she is doing fine, let them go till they finish or are tired. But they must go the 17 minutes. This gives a struggling child an “end time” so that they know reading isn’t something that lasts forever. But here’s the thing… for the remaining 13 minutes you and your child should discuss the book, talk about other books that they like and stories that they have made up in their heads. You should NOT consider this a “kill time,” this is just as important as reading the book you just put down. This part of the reading time is what fosters good reading and even writing habits. You want to finish with positive energy AND you want to secretly be preparing your child to read 30 minutes every day for the rest of their lives. 

 

Here are a few things to think about and do while you read with your child:

• Don’t give them a word they don’t recognize. Help them use strategies
• Find words within words
• Sound out word chunks that make a sound “th” “ph”
• Have them look at the illustrations to get clues
• Ask them if the word makes sense or what would make sense in the sentence
• Once they figure out a word, have them back up and reread the sentence with the correct word/s
• At the end of a page, ask them to explain what they have read. This is a big one because sometimes young readers are so focused on each and every word that they don’t realize that they have read a sentence at all.
• Before your child turns a page, ask him to predict what might happen on the next page.

As you read with your child, remember to be patient and encouraging. Reading should be fun.