Help Your Child Start the New Year with Strong Reading Skills

December holidays are often filled with parties, family gatherings, and loads of fun. During this time, many kids veer off their routines and do little, if any, reading or school work. Help your child start the new year with strong reading skills by trying the ideas detailed below.

Create a daily reading habit

Before school starts again, help your child set a daily reading routine – ideally 20 minutes per day. For younger children, you can read books aloud to them. Let your child pick the books they want you to read to them and make the ritual fun and engaging. The books they choose can even be holiday themed! Try to set a regular reading time and create a cozy, welcoming environment – perhaps a corner in their room with a comfortable chair and light – and make the reading experience enjoyable. Older kids can read on their own, also for 20 minutes or so per day, but ask them questions about the book after their reading session to make sure they understood it. You can also create family reading hour (or half hour, or even fifteen minutes), perhaps before or after dinner, where everyone in the family selects a book of their choice and reads their book in a communal space together. Once everyone is done reading, you can even go around and ask each person to talk about what they read, their favorite parts, and whether or not they’d recommend the book.

Develop reading fluency

Reading fluency is a key component of reading, and a skill that tends to lead to overall improved reading skills. To help your child build stronger reading fluency skills, try this choral reading strategy. Select a passage from a book and perform the following steps:

1. Have your child read the passage aloud to you as a cold read.

2. You read the same passage aloud to them, modeling good fluency.

3. They read the passage aloud with you, trying to keep up with your pace.

4. Your child reads the passage aloud one more time, and you praise them with how much their fluency has improved from their initial cold read.

The more your child’s fluency improves, the more their comprehension and overall reading skills will likely improve as well.

Build decoding skills

When students read, it’s important that they learn to decode, or “sound out” words, rather than guessing at them. Orton Gillingham instruction is a great research-based approach for building stronger decoding skills, but you can practice this skill at home too. When your child comes across a word they aren’t sure how to read, encourage them to sound it out rather than asking you what the word is (the same is true for spelling a word). For example, if they come across a word like “plug”, remind them to break the word into its individual sounds and try to sound it out. Likewise, for words such as “cupcake” or “sandwich”, encourage them to break the word into its individual syllables and sound out the word accordingly. If your child continues to struggle with decoding words, Orton Gillingham tutoring may be very helpful for them.

Ask questions!

Help your child become an active reader and improve their reading comprehension skills by asking them questions about the book you are reading to them or they are reading themselves. If you are reading aloud to your child, stop every 2-3 pages or so and ask them questions about the story, such as: Who are the main characters? Which events have happened so far in the story? Where does the story take place? You can also ask them to create inferences and make predictions about what may happen next in the story. If your child is reading to themselves, ask them similar questions. They can even use sticky notes to write 1-2 line summaries about what they read after every three pages or so and stick them in their book. They can also create character maps describing each character and plot summary sheets at the end of each chapter as they read.

Holidays can be lots of fun, but make sure your child doesn’t stop reading during this time. Try these ideas at home to help your child keep their reading skills strong and start the year on a positive note.