Put Reading First!

Helping Your Child Learn to Read

Becoming a reader involves the development of important skills, including learning to:

Use language in conversation

Listen and respond to stories read aloud

Recognize and name the letters of the alphabet

Listen to the sounds of spoken language

Connect sounds to letters to figure out words

Read often so that recognizing words becomes easy and automatic

Learn to use new words

Understand what is read

At home you  can help your child by:

• Read books with rhymes. Teach your child rhymes, short poems, and songs.

• Help your child separate the sounds in words, listen for beginning and ending sounds, and put separate sounds together.

• Practice the alphabet by pointing out letters wherever you see them and by reading alphabet books.

• Pointing out the letter-sound relationships your child is learning on labels, boxes, newspapers, magazines, and signs.

• Listening to your child read words and books from school

• Rereading familiar books.

• Talk with you child about the books she is reading. Ask about new words. Ask about the characters, places, and events that happened in the story.

• Take your child to the library and help her to choose books to at home.

Choosing the right book for your child

It is important to choose appropriate books so that your child will develop a love for reading. If the book is too difficult for your child to read, he may become frustrated and dislike reading. For help in finding just the right book, speak to your child’s teacher, a librarian, or one of the reading teachers.

    Tips for choosing a book for beginners to read:

·        Choose books with pictures that contain good clues about the words in the book.

·        At first, books should only have one line of print per page.

·        Later, as your child’s reading skills develop, choose books with two or three lines of print per page and have good spacing between each line.

·        Books should contain only a few new words or concepts. These words should be easy to figure out by using the pictures.

 ****Do the five finger test - Have your child open the   book to any page and read. If he/she does not know 5 of the words, the book is too hard. Try another book!

Word Attack Strategies

• Sound out the word - /b/-/a/-/ t/

• Look for the little word in a bigger word - fin

• Skip the word and read to the end of the sentence. The word may pop  into your head.

• Reread - Does it make sense?

• Think about a word that looks like the word - look = took

Basic Sight Words

From 50-75% of all words used in school books, library books, newspapers, and magazines are in the Dolch Basic Sight Vocabulary of 220 words. They are words that cannot be learned through the use of pictures. Because they are used to hold thoughts together, these words must be recognized immediately before a child can read fluently.

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