5 ways to help your child read better

Effective reading instruction calls for five major things, according to the National Reading Panel in 2001 and today’s experts:

• Phonemic awareness: That’s understanding the sounds within words. For example, knowing what “dog,” “dark” and “den” all have in common.
• Phonics: That’s understanding how sounds and letters work together. For example, understanding “th” or “ea” letter combinations.
• Fluency: That’s when a reader can recognize enough words to begin reading almost automatically, allowing them to think about what the words mean when they are put together.
• Vocabulary: People learn new words through listening, reading, direct instruction or using strategies. Strategies include using dictionaries or interpreting a word’s meaning by using context clues throughout the rest of the sentence.
• Text comprehension: This is when someone is reading actively and purposefully to ensure comprehension of a text. A teacher can ensure students are doing this by, for example, giving students a text and a list of questions to answer once they’ve finished reading.

Tips to help you support your reluctant reader

What that means for parents is this:

Read to your children: Researchers recommend parents read to and with their children, even parents for whom English is not a first language. Practice is always helpful. A parent can read a more difficult book to their child to help build vocabulary. If the parent wants to build on specific reading skills, they can read an easier book with their children that requires them to use the phonics skills they already have.

Clap with the syllables: In the early grades, students are focused on building word-reading skills. It helps to build phonological awareness, or phonemic awareness, says Jill Grifenhagen, an associate professor of literacy education at North Carolina State University’s College of Education. That’s the ability to break apart words and sounds and put them back together again. That can be built in pre-kindergarten or kindergarten with things like rhyming games, or clapping syllables. “Eventually, we want kids to practice things like breaking words into their individual sounds and then blending sounds together to make a word,” Grifenhagen said.

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Sound out words: When a parent reads with their child, they should help their child sound out words they don’t recognize, breaking them down into parts and then putting them together to make a whole word. Try visually breaking the parts down, if it helps. A visual breakdown could be using coins for each sound, then putting the coins together to make the word.

Limit use of context clues: If the child doesn’t recognize a word, don’t try to make the child guess using other clues on the page. Context clues can be important for understanding a new word’s meaning, but they aren’t helpful when the child is still learning phonics and the basics of reading. A common misconception is that children need to be prompted when they struggle to read a word, Grifenhagen said. “If a child came to the word ‘hen,’ and they either don't have the phonemic awareness or haven't yet learned the sounds for those letters, they might make a guess. And they might guess something that would make sense in that sentence, or they might look at the picture and guess ‘chicken,’ right?” she said. “We wouldn't want to prompt them to do that. We want them to have the word-reading skills to be able to look at the sounds and blend those together. So if your child did that automatically, you'd might direct them back to the sounds.”

Watch the eyes: When the child is reading, make sure their eyes are moving across the words and that they aren’t guessing or reciting a known text from memory. Eventually, reading will become automatic and readers will recognize more words more quickly. But reciting a book from memory instead of reading over the words can be a sign that the child has merely memorized the text and hasn’t necessarily learned to read the words on the page. Children might memorize high-frequency words at first that have more challenging spelling patterns than what they’ve been learning, like the word “the.” Kindergarteners don’t go over the “th” sound when first learning letters. Eventually, students will learn why “the” is spelled the way it is.