Look for evidence-based reading instruction

If your child is struggling with reading, tutoring using an evidence-based, multi-sensory approach is most effective. One such method is called the Orton Gillingham approach, which is a structured, multi-sensory, diagnostic and prescriptive method for helping students develop stronger decoding and spelling skills. With this approach, students use tools such as colored sand, magnetic tiles, mini whiteboards, and shaving cream, amongst other related tools, as part of a systematic approach to teaching. An example of a NYC Orton Gillingham tutoring lesson might involve teaching the digraph “sh” so that the student can ultimately learn how to read words containing this digraph. An Orton Gillingham tutoring lesson might be structured as follows:

• The reading specialist starts by holding up an audio-visual flash card with the letters “sh” on the front and a key picture of a ship on the back.
• The reading specialist holds up the card and says, “These are the letters sh, like ship (they’d flip the card around), it makes the sound /sh/” (they’d flip the card back around).
• The student repeats that sequence on their own, then moves onto skywriting.
• The Orton Gillingham reading specialist models writing those letters in the sky, saying aloud as they trace them, “around and around” (for s) and “down, up, and hump” (for h).
• The student skywrites the letters on their own, then traces them in colored sand or shaving cream.
• The student completes Orton Gillingham workbook exercises corresponding to that sound.
• The Orton Gillingham tutor may use magnetic tiles or other similar tools to have the student practice blending sounds together, forming words such as ship, shut, or shop.

These multi-sensory Orton Gillingham tutoring lessons provided by a reading specialist in NYC can help your child develop much stronger reading skills.

Find a reading specialist in NYC who uses a structured plan

When your child begins their tutoring sessions, it’s important that the reading specialist in NYC has a structured plan in place for the tutoring. Instead of bringing in random unrelated worksheets or books to each session, they should have a systematic learning plan, starting with the levels and skills your child needs help with and building upwards from there. For example, if your child is struggling to read consonant-vowel-consonant words (like hug, mit, rag), the reading specialist should begin with a structured, multi-sensory tutoring plan that teaches individual letters and their corresponding sounds and work on how to blend those sounds together to form basic words. Once your child has mastered reading these basic words, the reading specialist should move onto words containing blends, consonant digraphs, vowel digraphs, r-controlled patterns, and so on, all following a systematic Orton Gillingham tutoring plan.

Read more about NYC dyslexia tutoring at: https://eblcoaching.com/what-should-i-look-for-in-a-dyslexia-tutor/

Choose a reading specialist with expertise in your child’s age and grade level

Some reading specialists in NYC focus on teaching older students comprehension strategies, including making inferences and synthesizing main ideas. Others might focus on early childhood reading, and some NYC reading specialists may have expertise in teaching decoding and reading fluency to middle and high school students. It’s important that your child’s Manhattan reading specialist has expertise in working with students at their age and grade level and uses tools and strategies appropriate to your child’s specific needs.

Make sure your child connects well with the reading specialist’s personality

The right personality match is key in effective reading tutoring sessions. When you look for a reading specialist in Manhattan for your child, try to find someone who you think your child will click with. If your child prefers younger, bubbly personalities, try to find a reading specialist who fits that profile. If your child prefers quieter tutors or perhaps older, more seasoned reading specialists, look for those qualities when searching for the ideal reading tutor in Manhattan for your child.
Finding the right reading specialist in NYC can make a big difference in your child’s academic performance. With research-based methodologies, a structured tutoring plan, and the right personality match, a reading specialist can help your child develop stronger reading skills and improve their self-confidence. Learn about how EBL Coaching can help your child develop stronger reading skills with our one-on-one reading tutoring program in NYC and Orton Gillingham instruction at www.eblcoaching.com.

Learn more about the science of reading tutoring at https://eblcoaching.com/what-is-the-science-of-reading/

Frequently asked questions 

What are signs your child may need a reading specialist?
Your child may benefit from receiving tutoring sessions from a reading specialist if they demonstrate any of the following challenges:

• Difficulty sounding out words
• Reads slowly with a lot of effort
• Avoids reading or doing reading assignments
• Has trouble with spelling and writing
• Struggles to comprehension materials they read
• Has low self-esteem or becomes easily frustrated when trying to read

What does a reading specialist do?
A reading specialist provides specialized reading tutoring to students to develop their overall reading skills, including phonemic awareness, decoding, reading fluency, and reading comprehension.

What are some benefits of Orton Gillingham tutoring?
Orton Gillingham tutoring has many benefits! Some of these benefits include:

• Research-based approach to reading intervention
• Multi-sensory tools
• Structured lessons that build upon one another
• Individualized tutoring sessions based on student needs
• Lessons are diagnostic and prescriptive, and move at student’s pace
• Helps develop stronger decoding and spelling skills

Dr. Emily Levy, the founder and director of EBL Coaching, has been providing reading remediation and Orton Gillingham tutoring in NYC for over 20 years.

The post What to Look for in a Reading Specialist in NYC appeared first on EBL Coaching.

A ChildNEXUS Podcast: Ep. 215, How to Support Students Who Struggle with Reading Comprehension

Highlighting

Many students are passive, rather than active, readers. This means that they are reading text but are not actively engaged in what they are reading and therefore may miss out on key information. Help your child develop stronger active reading and reading comprehension skills with a tri-colored highlighting strategy. Explain to your child that when we read, there are three elements we should look for: the topic, which is one, two, or three words describing the passage; the main idea, which is what the author is saying about the passage; and the important details, or salient information describing the main idea. They should highlight the topic in blue, main idea in green, and important details in yellow. Then select a news article or passage from a workbook. Ask your child to first read the article or passage without doing any highlighting, then go back and highlight the topic, main idea, and important details using blue, green, and yellow highlighters. You can even have them write a 1-2 line summary in their own words at the bottom of the page, summarizing what they just read. Developing stronger active reading skills can help your child excel in all subjects at school!

Reading Books

You can also teach your child strategies to help them become more actively engaged in the text when they are reading a novel. As they read, have them stop after every 2-3 pages and tell you a short summary of what they just read. Independently, they can also use a post-it note to write a 1-2 line summary of the information they read and stick it inside the book after those 2-3 pages. When they complete the chapter, they should write a one paragraph chapter summary in a separate notebook detailing what they just read, helping to ensure they grasped all of the events in the story. You can also have them fill out a character map at the end of each chapter when new characters are introduced, detailing the character’s name, a description about them and perhaps any good or bad qualities they noticed about each character and examples from the book that depict those qualities. Additionally, you may want to discuss with your child what they think may happen next in the story and why they think certain events may have happened. The more engaged they can be with the text, the better!

Visualizing

Learning to visualize information when reading is another important skill for reading comprehension success. You can help your child learn to visualize text starting with individual sentence visualizations. To do so, read a sentence to your child, like, “Dax was walking home from school when it started raining.” Ask your child pointed questions to help them form a visual image of the information in this sentence. For example, you might ask questions like, “How old do you think Dax is? What color hair does he have? Was he walking on a sidewalk or the street? Was he holding an umbrella? If so, what color was the umbrella?” Once your child has created a visual image of this sentence in their mind and has described this image to you, move onto the next sentence in the story and ask similar prompting questions. At the end of the story, have your child retell each sentence with all of the details from the visual images they created in their minds.

Tutoring

If your child continues to struggle with reading comprehension despite trying these strategies at home, you may want to consider one-on-one tutoring. This specialized tutoring can be targeted to your child’s individual needs and can help them develop much stronger reading comprehension skills, key for academic success.

Reading comprehension is one of the most important skills in school. Try these strategies at home to help improve your child’s confidence and overall academic performance

Read more about improving your child’s reading skills at https://eblcoaching.com/how-to-improve-your-dyslexic-childs-reading-skills/ and https://www.ldonline.org/ld-topics/reading-dyslexia/about-reading-disabilities-learning-disabilities-and-reading

The post How Reading Comprehension Tutoring Can Help Students appeared first on EBL Coaching.

A new report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress paints a sobering picture of children’s reading levels. The report, based on 2024 test scores, found that a record-low number of fourth and eighth-grade students in the U.S. had below-basic reading skills.

According to the NAEP, one-third (33%) of eighth graders had “below-basic” reading skills — the largest number since the exam began in 1969. Additionally, 40% of fourth graders’ reading skills were considered “below-basic,” the most in two decades.1

“Not only did most students not recover from pandemic-related learning loss, but those students who were the most behind and needed the most support have fallen even further behind,” the U.S. Department of Education said in a statement.

As troubling as these numbers are, they open the door for constructive conversation.

“The National Report Card does not negate that some individual schools, individual teachers, and students are doing a great job,” says Karen Aronian, Ed.D., an education and parenting expert. “However, the NAEP report card is a wake-up call, an overview for our country to take stock of how students, teachers, and schools are performing so they can recalibrate.”

Education and literacy experts discuss the reasons for the low reading skills scores and share small ways parents can foster a love of reading from an early age.

Expert Theories Behind Low Reading Scores

In what may sound like an all-too-familiar refrain, the pandemic likely plays a role here.

Emily Levy, Ed.D., a learning specialist and the founder and director of EBL Coaching, points out that most kids who were in fourth grade in 2024 were in kindergarten during the pandemic.

“Kindergarten is a time when the foundations of reading are established,” she says. “Students begin to learn the names of the letters and their corresponding sounds and how to blend sounds together to form words. Without these foundations, reading only becomes more challenging as students progress through school, and it was extremely difficult to teach these critical skills remotely to children at such a young age.”

Similarly, students who were in eighth grade in 2024 were fourth-graders during the acute phase of the pandemic.

“That’s a time when we typically see a shift from learning to read to reading to learn, and students are taught essential reading comprehension and inferencing skills,” Dr. Levy notes.

Dr. Aronian says absenteeism also rose during the pandemic and continues to do so. For instance, a 2024 New York State Comptroller report found that approximately one in three New York students were chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year, defined as missing 10% of school days. Alaska had the nation’s highest rates (45%).2

However, experts say attributing the reading scores to a pandemic fallout oversimplifies a complicated issue. In a January 2025 report by the American Enterprise Institute, education researcher Nat Malkus notes that the dip in skills seen in American children mirrors that of adults over the same period.3

He also points to other familiar culprits like screens and social media. The experts Parents spoke with agree.

“While there are some apps and programs that can be valuable educational tools, prolonged exposure to screens and social media can be detrimental to a child’s attention span, interfere with very important critical thinking skills, and impact the ability to ask thought-provoking and high-level questions,” says Kristen Miller, Director of Education at Celebree School, which offers programs for infants to school-aged children.

Miller says scrolling forces people to process information quickly. Ideally, people take time to think about what they are reading or seeing and absorb the information.

Dr. Aronian notes the distracting nature of smartphones and watches in schools, but says that’s changing. (For instance, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul recently introduced a proposal to curb smartphone use in schools.) One hope of policy proposals like these is to help students focus.

In 2024, college professors reported students were arriving on campus unprepared to read full texts and with smaller vocabularies than previous generations, pointing to middle and high school curriculums focusing on comprehending the “main ideas” gleaned from shorter passages.

“I do not think there is a lack of rigor necessarily in the high school curricula, but the stakes are high in public schools as a result of state assessment tests and accountability,” says Jan Lacina, Ph.D., the senior associate dean for research, graduate studies, and strategic partnerships at Texas Christian University’s College of Education. “As a result, district curricula may be structured to prepare children for tests and lack the framework for preparing students to be critical readers, thinkers, and writers.”

How to Help Your Child Love Reading

More funding for teacher development and libraries, less focus on test scores, and more free and accessible in-person tutoring were just a few of the many systemic and structural changes experts point to as necessary to shift reading skills. However, parents can’t change the system overnight by reading bedtime stories to little ones. They can, however, prioritize reading from an early age.

Model behavior

“To encourage children’s reading, parents must model a love of reading and set up reading zones in your home, cars, and for bathtime,” Dr. Aronian says, pointing out that some books are waterproof. “Always have a book in your bag for subway rides, waits in line and downtimes.”

Dr. Lacina suggests discussing your latest reads with your child to show you value literacy.

Make reading routine

“Develop a routine for reading aloud to your child, beginning with an infant and continuing throughout their early childhood years,” Dr. Lacina says. “As children begin to read independently, have your child read to you each day.”

Keep it fun

“Identify topics [your] child is interested in—dinosaurs, unicorns, plants—just about any topic is fine, and find books on that topic for their child to read or for [you] to read to [your] child,” Dr. Levy says. “This might also include magazines, comics, and news articles—anything that will help engage their child and make them enjoy reading.”

The post Latest National Report Card Says Kids’ Reading Scores Have Hit All-Time Lows appeared first on EBL Coaching.

Perfect for kids who aren’t big into page-turning.

Some kids love the thrill of turning the pages of paper book. They enjoy visually gauging their reading progress and find reading on a comfortable chair or couch simply relaxing. Many children, however, gravitate to tech tools. They jump on any opportunity to swipe, press, or share, and are easily engaged by digital content. Tap into this “tech savvy-ness” with the reading apps below for kids ages 4-11 to help your child build critical reading skills while still having fun.

Age 4-8

Starfall Learn to Read

With this engaging app, kids can practice their decoding skills using 15 mini multi-sensory books, each of which focus on an individual sound, including short vowels, long vowels, vowel teams, and r-controlled vowels. When reading each book, your child can click on the word if she has trouble decoding it and the app will vocalize its correct pronunciation, and if she clicks on the image on each book page, the characters and objects will “come alive” with movements and sounds, providing humor and loads of fun.

Bob Books Reading Magic

This app helps emerging readers learn to blend sounds together to both read and spell words. It contains four levels, starting with basic consonant-vowel-consonant words and progressing into longer, more challenging words, and serves as a great supplement to Orton Gillingham reading lessons. Players must spell basic words first by matching letter tiles to ones already provided as visual hints. Once they have done so, the app sounds out the word and the images become colorful and animated. Later, “visual hints” are not provided and players must drag letters in order to spell words, providing higher level reading and spelling practice.

Homer-Kids Learn to Read

This app helps kids develop their early reading skills, along with other basic skills such as shapes, numbers, and color identification. It also integrates reading comprehension and critical thinking practice, skills that become increasingly important as students move through school. To play, students follow a “wickle avatar” around a map containing various activities, through four different levels. Kids enjoy learning about a variety of topics, including animals, transportation, music, and more, through both listening and reading. The app contains enjoyable worksheets to practice specific skills and 60 books to read.

Age 8-11

Duh Books

This app is a great one for curious kids who love learning about zany, interesting topics. It contains a variety of e-books‎ on various fascinating topics including animals, natural disasters, the universe, and many more. Players learn new information provided in simple terms, enjoy the engaging visuals, and can click on links if they are interested in learning more about a topic. It’s great for kids who love learning new facts and information about the world.

National Geographic Kids

This is a great app for kids who love seeing amazing, hard-to-capture photographs and are inspired by reading new information about fascinating topics. The app contains stories, “weird but true” facts, jokes, photo games, puzzles, and quizzes on topics such as history, science, technology, wildlife, and worldwide cultures. Kids love the engaging, eye opening content and have fun learning loads of new information.

‎As students move through school, the reading requirements will increase rapidly. Help your child develop key reading skills while enjoying the process, and she will be well on her well to excelling in school!

The post The Best Reading Apps For All Grade Levels appeared first on EBL Coaching.

Help your child continue to build her academic skills and prevent the all too common “summer slide” with these fun ideas.

Summer is a time for outdoor games, poolside laughter, and fun in the sun. Yet, it is also a time when many kids lose valuable academic skills. In fact, research tells us that kids can lose up to three months of academic gains in reading and math over the summer. Help your child continue to build her academic skills and prevent the all too common “summer slide” with the ideas detailed below.

Read…a lot!

It’s easy to let regular reading time slip over the summer when days are long and activities often run late. Yet, it is important that kids continue reading on a consistent ‎basis throughout the course of the summer. This isn’t just limited to novels–your child can read newspapers, comic books, trivia books, short stories, or the like. You may even try setting up “family reading hour” (or portion of an hour) where all members of your family gather together for a pre-set time period and read. Try to lead by example and show your child how much joy reading can bring. In doing so, he will likely follow your lead and eventually come to enjoy the task.

Play (fun) learning games

Most kids enjoy playing games, so take advantage of down time this summer to play some education-based games that are still loads of fun. You can play Boggle, for instance, where you shake a tray filled with dice to form a grid of 16 letters. Players then have three minutes to create as many words as they can using the letters. You can also try playing Apples to Apples, where players build their language skills by matching red “object” cards to green “descriptive” cards and try to come up with the best pairs. To build your child’s vocabulary and reading skills, play Zingo!, where players match pictures and words, or you can play HiHo! Cherry-O with younger children to build foundational math skills, like number recognition, counting, and basic arithmetic.

Have fun in the kitchen!

To build your child’s math skills, ‎try cooking a meal or baking a dessert with him. If you decide to make brownies, for instance, ask your child to measure the correct amount of oil and water in a measuring cup. You may try “doubling” the recipe and ask him how much more of each ingredient you would now need, and how many more brownies you can now expect with the doubled ingredients. Have him read the recipe and directions to practice his reading skills, or perhaps have him write a menu for a meal you cook your family, or a review on each dish you created. The more fun and interactive you can make the process, the better!

Practice writing at the beach

For younger children, you can work on basic skills development, like letter and number writing, using sand at the beach, dirt at the park, or even flour in your kitchen. For instance, if you are practicing the letter p, have your child say the words “down, up, and around” out loud as she traces the letter in the sand, or “around, up, and down” as she writes the letter a. You might try spraying some shaving cream on a cookie tray and have her trace different letters and numbers using her finger for added tactile reinforcement. For basic math skills, have her count out a quantity of jelly beans or buttons, then ask her questions like, “If my friend gives me 2 j‎elly beans and another friend gives me 2 more jelly beans, how many jelly beans would I have all together?” or “If I had 5 jelly beans but I ate 2 of them, how many would I have left?” These types of exercises will help your child learn to solve basic addition and subtraction problems.

Electronic learning

Most kids love playing games on an iPad, so why not try integrating some learning-based apps? Try some of the following ones:

Starfall Learn to Read

Ages 4 and up

This is a great app for reinforcing basic reading skills. It includes 15 short books for kids to read that each emphasize a different sound pattern and contain animated videos, songs, and engaging characters. Each book also includes activities related to the story, including matching and fill-in-the-blank exercises.

Hungry Fish
Ages 4-8

This app is a helpful tool for building addition, subtraction, and mental math skills. To play, kids drag and combine numbers in bubbles, then “feed” them to a floating fish. When the fish is fed correct answers, it expands, and it shrinks when it does not receive correct answers. As players complete each level, they move on to more challenging ones, always receiving immediate feedback along the way.

Sentence Builder

Ages 6 and up

Your child can develop important grammar, sentence structure, and overall writing skills with this fun and engaging app. To play, students use slot machine-style wheels to select words, then create sentences describing various pictures. The app begins with basic sentences and later moves onto more complex ones. The images are bright and colorful, and students build critical sentence formation and writing skills.

Summer is a time when many kids lose key academic skills. Try these activities to help your child prevent “summer slide” and jump-start the new school year on a positive note.

The post 5 Tips For Preventing Summer Slide appeared first on EBL Coaching.

Originally published on the Macaroni Kid website

For most dyslexic children, reading is an arduous task. They often struggle to sound out words and read with fluency and, as a result, find little pleasure in reading. While most children with dyslexia benefit from multi-sensory instruction from a trained professional, you can help your child develop her reading skills – and joy for reading – with the strategies detailed below.

Word Attack
Children with dyslexia typically have trouble with sounding out words – especially ones they haven’t seen before. Many students look at the beginning sound and guess at the correct word or simply skip certain words when reading. In doing so, their reading becomes inaccurate and may lead to a loss of meaning. To develop these decoding skills, your child will likely need comprehensive multi-sensory reading instruction,  but you can help reinforce these skills by encouraging him to sound out shorter words and syllabicate longer words when reading, rather than guessing. For a young child, have him trace letters in colored sand, salt, or shaving cream for a tactile experience. If your child struggles to spell a word, rather than immediately providing the correct spelling, use a set of magnetic tiles and ask him to spell the word sound-by-sound using the tiles.

Reading Fluency
Reading fluency is a key component to reading for meaning. Help your child improve her reading fluency with this four-step choral reading process:
1. Select a passage to read, slightly below your child’s approximate reading level. Have her read the passage aloud as a cold read.
2. Next, you read the same passage aloud to model appropriate fluency.
3. Your child then reads the same passage with you, keeping up with your pace.
4. Finally, your child reads the same passage out loud as a final read. Draw her attention to the difference between her first and final reads and empower her with the improvement!
Repeatedly practicing this strategy with your child will help build her confidence and fluency when reading.

Reading Comprehension
Becoming an active reader can help students improve their overall comprehension and memory skills. To build this skill, before reading a passage or text book selection, ask your child to review any headers, sub-headers, pictures, picture captions, and vocabulary words. You can also talk to him about prior knowledge he may have about the topic before reading, and have him predict what he thinks the passage will be about before he begins. Also, as he reads, have him highlight the topic (one, two, or three words describing the passage) in blue, main idea (what the author is saying about the topic) in green, and the important details (important information describing the main idea) in yellow. These active reading strategies will help improve his processing and overall reading comprehension skills.

Vocabulary
Many dyslexic children respond well to visual graphics ‎for learning new information. To help your child learn new vocabulary words, try this multi-modal approach:
Have her write each vocab word using a black marker on the front of a flash card. Then have her turn the card around and divide the back side into three horizontal sections. ‎At the top, she should write the definition of the word in her own words (not verbatim from a dictionary). She should then draw a horizontal line beneath it, and write a detailed sentence integrating the word. Finally, at the bottom she should draw a picture illustrating her sentence to help her remember the definition.
As students progress through school, the reading and language demands increase rapidly. Try these tips and strategies to help your dyslexic child feel more confident and successful in school‎.

The post How to Improve Your Dyslexic Child’s Reading Skills appeared first on EBL Coaching.

Kids will love these fun educational apps that will keep them learning even during the summer months. Dr. Levy’s 5 picks include apps for kids ages 4-16 that help build reading and math skills.

During the sunny months away from school, reading, writing, and math frequently take a back seat to summer fun. Students can lose important skills they gained during the school year without continuous instruction over the summer. In fact, research tells us that students score lower on standardized tests at the end of the summer than at the start of the season.

Help your child avoid losing critical academic skills over the summer with these five apps:

Starfall Learn to Read
Ages 4+
$2.99
Download for Apple or Android

With this multi-sensory app, students can listen, read, and touch letters and words to practice basic reading and spelling skills. The app includes 15 short books for kids to read, each emphasizing a different sound pattern, along with animated videos, songs, and funny characters. At the end of each book, students can play reading-related activities, including matching and fill-in-the-blank exercises. The app is fun, engaging, and interactive.

Sentence Builder
Ages 6+
$5.99
Download for iPad

Students have fun developing their grammar and sentence-writing abilities with this app. To play, they create sentences describing various pictures using slot machine-style wheels for selecting words. The game format is simple, starting with basic sentences and moving into more complex ones. The images and animations are colorful, and students build critical written expression and sentence-structure skills.

Hungry Fish
Ages 4-8
$1.99-$3.99
Download for Apple or Android

This app is an engaging tool for reinforcing basic addition and subtraction as well as mental math. To play, kids drag and combine numbers in bubbles and feed them to a floating fish. The fish expands when it receives “food” (correct answer combinations) and shrinks when it does not receive food. As players complete and “win” each level they move on to more advanced ones, while receiving immediate feedback along the way. It’s a valuable learning tool disguised as an arcade game!

Montessori Crosswords
Ages 3-10
$2.99
Download for Apple or Android

This app is a great one for helping students develop basic phonics skills. For each exercise, the player is given a picture and is asked to drag letters from the bottom of the screen to spell the item depicted. The app starts with basic three-letter (consonant-vowel-consonant) words and moves into more complex words with blends, digraphs, and multi-syllabic words. Children can create single words and, later, multiple words using a crossword-style format. The exercises are helpful for both reading and spelling.

Learning Fundamentals: Reading Comprehension at the Paragraph Level
Ages 9-16
$3.99
Download for Apple

This app builds a myriad of skills, including attention, memory, and reading comprehension. It’s also useful for developing processing and higher-order thinking skills. Students can choose from 37 stories about various topics, including adventures, nature, and history, among others. After reading each passage, they answer main idea, important details, and inference questions in multiple-choice format, along with an opened-ended question that can be used for discussion.

The post 5 Apps to Keep Kids Learning in Summer appeared first on EBL Coaching.

Prevent academic regression over summer break with these engaging reading activities

For many students, ‎the end of the school year represents a time for celebration. Girls and boys toss their backpacks aside, throw on their bathing suits, and jump right into recreation and exploration. Thoughts of school and reading often shift to the sidelines. Yet according to research, during the ‎summer, students can lose up to two to three months of reading skills. At the start of the school year, many teachers spend a month or longer reviewing previously taught reading concepts. Rather than watching your child follow this all-too-common path of academic regression, encourage reading enrichment with the activities described below.

Vacations: Your child might associate vacations with packing suitcases and engaging in outdoor activities. Yet he can help plan and organize your summer vacation while practicing key reading skills. To start, have him research various travel destinations online. He can surf websites for popular spots such as Disney World, Yellowstone National Park, Myrtle Beach, or Mount Rushmore, for instance. He can also take notes on the information he reads (a good time to tie in mini-lessons on shorthand and note taking!), then create a written chart detailing the pros and cons of each destination. Once you have selected a vacation spot, order guidebooks for him to read, along with reviews online about the top attractions at your destination. When you are on your vacation, he can collect brochures and plan your daily activities. Also encourage him to read billboards along the highway, signs at amusement parks, and menus at local restaurants.

Rewards: Tie in some incentives to make reading over the summer an even more appealing endeavor. Come up with a list of rewards for reading books (paper or electronic) and set point values for each one. Make sure your child is involved in the process of selecting rewards she truly wants to earn. Together, for instance, you might decide that an electronic game is worth 30 points, a pool float is worth 25, and a trip to the movies is worth 20. Then establish point values for various books. A thin book may be worth 5 points, a thicker one 10, and so on. She can “exchange” her points for prizes at the end of each week or at a pre-determined time. Just make sure the rewards are realistic and attainable.

Select a theme: Have your child choose a reading “theme” for the summer, and plan regular trips to the bookstore or library to select theme-based books. For example, your child might choose to read about sports, cooking, artists, or animals during the summer. Have him read books on this topic and also engage in other theme-based activities. If he chooses animals, for instance, he might find books at the library on bees, birds, and crocodiles; browse articles on the National Geographic website; or even build a bird’s nest or hunt for bugs outside (and perhaps write a report on his observations and findings).

Watch movies: Find a set of books for your child to read over the summer that have corresponding movies available to watch. Have your child read the book first, and then watch the movie. Be sure to tie in prediction, plot, and other comprehension questions‎ before and after the book and movie. For instance, before he starts reading the book have him predict what he thinks it will be about along with any information he might already know about the topic. As he reads the book, ask him to tell you (and even write) the plot summary, a description of each character, and reasons why he did or did not like the book. After he watches the movie, have him compare it to the book and perhaps even create a Venn diagram on a large white board or sheet of paper comparing them. Initiate a discussion with him on protagonists, antagonists, conflicts, climax, and conclusions. These activities will build reading and auditory comprehension skills, and will help make him a more active reader.

Technology: Reading paper books isn’t the only option for practicing key skills over the summer. Electronic books and games on tablets and computers serve as great tools for reinforcing reading. Your child will enjoy age and level-appropriate interactive reading games and books, while actively engaging in the learning process. For example‎, MarbleMinds Phonics and Montessori Crosswords are great apps for helping younger students practice phonics skills. Question Builder is a useful app for comprehension and reasoning skills, and Reading Eggs Sight Words is an engaging app for sight word practice. Additionally, Reading Rainbow and FarFaria offer book reading subscription services containing large libraries of books, and Starfall.com is an interactive website for practicing decoding and fluency.

The post Top 5 Summer Reading Activities for Kids appeared first on EBL Coaching.

Building the foundation of reading when children are young arms them with the skill set to become avid, enthusiastic readers as they grow older. Try these tips for helping your child develop early reading skills:

Teach sound/symbol relationships

At a young age (prior to starting Kindergarten), teach your child that each letter has a corresponding sound. To help him make this connection, try connecting each sound to a key picture. For example, p makes the sound /p/ like pizza and s makes the sound /s/ like sun. You can integrate a fun arts and crafts project for extra reinforcement by having your child create a large flash card with the name of the letter on the front of the card (you should write the letter for pre-writers) and the key picture on the back. Your child can draw a picture of a colorful pizza on the back of the p card and a picture of a glistening sun on the back of the s card. Hang up the cards around your house or lay them out on the table during meal times to practice connecting each letter to its corresponding sound and key picture.

Play phonemic awareness games

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, recognize, and manipulate sounds in words. Before they can learn to read, children must understand that words are made of individual sounds and that these sounds can be manipulated to form new words. ‎One phonemic awareness exercise you can try with your child is a segmenting/blending game. For example, tell your child, “I will say two sounds and I want you to tell me what word is formed when you blend the sounds together.” You might say the sounds /a/ and /t/ and your child should tell you that the word “at” is formed. After forming several two letter words, increase the challenge to three letter words. For example, you might give your child the sounds /c/-/a/-/t/, /p/-/i/-/g/, or /f/-/u/-/n/ and ask him what word is formed with each of these sound combinations. ‎You can also play a rhyming game where you select a word (like “fan”) and go around the room, asking everyone to come up with words that rhyme with it. Read aloud!

Starting when your child is a baby, read to her on a daily basis. For toddlers, you can read sensory-based books, like Pat the Bunny, where she can see, smell, and feel objects in the story while you read. For children who are a bit older, engage them in the text by asking questions as you read, like “Why do you think that happened?, “What might happen next?” or “How do you think that made the character feel?” Teaching children at a young age to be active readers is a valuable skill that will help them as they progress through school.‎

Practice writing

Start by having him practice writing letter strokes and eventually move into actual letters. Try using an easel or white board and help your child write top-to-bottom straight and diagonal lines, then crossed lines and circles. Model each one first, practice the strokes together, and then encourage him to write them on his own.When he is ready, teach him specific lingo for forming each letter. For example, when he writes the letter p, he should say “down, up, and around” as he forms the letter. When he writes the letter s, he should say “around and around.” Try having him write these letters in the sky with his finger, in a cookie tray filled with colored sand or salt, or even with shaving cream (if you don’t mind the mess).

Keep it fun

When reading to your child or teaching him to read to you, keep it fun! Try sitting inside a pillow-and-sheet constructed “tent” when ‎reading scary stories, eat a new food when reading about its taste and texture, or have your child illustrate a story that you make up.Be sure to give your child positive reinforcement and encouragement for even the smallest reading milestone. Enjoy the quality time you share with her when reading and make sure she enjoys the process. Arming her with a strong reading foundation will help bring her success for years to come.

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Montessori Crosswords

This app helps students develop their decoding, spelling, and writing skills by teaching them to build words with different phonics patterns. Students start by building basic CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, then move into words with blends, digraphs, silent e, vowel teams, and other combinations. Students are initially given a picture (like “bag” or “kid”) and are asked to drag letters from the alphabet at the bottom of the screen to spell the word displayed. Later, students spell words following specific phonics patterns in the form of crosswords. Students can also choose themes for the activities, like animals, food, clothes, etc.

Short Vowel Word Study

This is a great app for reinforcing basic word decoding at a Kindergarten/1st grade level. The app contains three main sections: word families, short vowels, and longer words. The first game is “Sort It,” where the child must sort a word into its proper vowel category; i, u, or a. In the “Find It” game‎, the child must find the “oddball” word that doesn’t belong in the same vowel family, and drag it to the bottom of the screen. The “Spell It” game reinforces spelling by displaying an image (like hat) and the child must drag letters to spell the word. The “Write It” game teaches students to trace and then independently write words. Other related fun and engaging reading games are also integrated into this app.

SuperWhy!

This app is a great one for building reading, spelling, writing, and phonemic awareness skills. It includes four games, each led by a different character: Alpha Pig, Princess Pesto, Wonder Red, and Super Why. In the Alpha Pig game, students find letters on a path to form different words. ‎In the Princess Pesto game, students practice writing letters to form words that are modeled first by Princess Pesto’s magic wand. In Wonder Red’s game, students identify rhyming words, and in Super Why’s game, students build their reading comprehension skills by identifying words that complete sentences in a given story.

Interactive Storybooks

For a wide selection of interactive, digital story books,MeeGenius is a great app that provides access to more than 700 children’s e-books for children up to age 8, which are accessible on iOS, Android, Windows 8, Amazon, Nook, and online.

Through the Princess and the Pea interactive story app, students either practice reading the Princess and the Pea or listen as the story is read aloud to them, reinforcing auditory comprehension, auditory processing, and listening skills. They can also play interactive games related to the story that are contained within the app, such as matching pictures, completing puzzles, and filling in missing items to complete a picture, all of which reinforce early learning skills.

Nursery Rhymes with Story Time

For younger children (ages 5 and younger), this app is great for building phonemic awareness and early reading skills. The app presents classic rhymes, such as Humpty Dumpty, Three Blind Mice, Jack and Jill, and others, in an interactive, playful format. While listening to the rhymes, children can “play” with the images. For example, when listening to Jack and Jill, children can drag a bucket of water up a well and watch flying fish and bubbles burst out of the water. The interactive illustrations make listening to rhymes and building core phonemic awareness skills great fun for children.

Encourage your child to use these apps and watch the colorful illustrations, energetic animations, and bursting colors turn reading into sheer excitement and joy.

Dr. Emily Levy is the founder of EBL Coaching, a tutoring program that specializes in one-on-one home and on-site instruction for students in grades preK-12 in NYC and NJ. She is also the author of Strategies for Study Success, a study skills workbooks series emphasizing test taking, note taking, reading comprehension, writing, and summarizing strategies, and the Flags and Stars Orton Gillingham student workbook series. These workbooks are currently used at schools nationwide.

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