Loving Literacy at Home
How You Can Help Your Child at Home with Reading & Literacy
By: Victoria Mullen
Are you Wanting Your Child to get Extra Literacy Practice at Home?
Let's Begin with the Ultimate Goal For Reading,....Comprehension!
Comprehension
As parents, you may wonder why your child is having trouble summarizing what they read, explaining character thoughts/traits, or is having difficulty connecting text-to-text, text-to-world or text-to-self. Here are some things that could you could do to help at home:
- Hold a conversation with your child about what they read, ask probing questions and have them generate their own questions.
- Help them to connect what they read to real-life events so they understand better.
- Talk about the meanings of certain words they may not know.
- Read material in shorter sections and then discuss each section before moving on to the next one. You can also "stop and jot" each section. They can read a section of text and then stop and jot down something important that they read.
- Use visual organizers to help them see visual relationships within a text.
Fluency and Phonics
Reading Fluency
Here are some ways you can help your student build their fluency at home:
- Choral read together-read a text at the same time together
- Record your child reading, evaluate and reread
- Model reading to your child using expression
- Focus on new vocabulary and discuss
- Make personal connections while reading with your child
- Create a comfortable atmosphere when reading
- Have your child track the words with their finger
- Boost confidence by having them reread something over and over
- Children can read a text to a pet, stuffed animal or sibling
- Listen to audiobooks
- Have your child write about their favorite part of the book and/or draw a picture
Phonics
The Orton Gillingham approach is a direct, structured, multi-sensory and diagnostic way to teach literacy. It is taught in a sequence of skills starting from reviewing letters/sounds, to blending letters together to form words, reviewing sight words, writing sentences and using decodable readers to decode words and help with fluency.
To learn more about the Orton Gillingham Approach click this link
Here are some ways you can practice phonics at home:
- Matching letters and sounds
- Making letters with playdoh
- Makking words with Scrabble tiles or BananaGrams
- Reading stories and having your child sound out the words
- Work on sounds pertaining to beginning and ending blends and digraphs
- Picture matching with words
Spelling, Written Expression and Word Families
Spelling
Nonsense words, such as fej, bok, or cimy are words that follow typical English spelling patterns but do not have meaning. Assessing your child's ability to decode these kinds of words can help to determine if he/she has gained letter-sound correspondence.
Here is a great video that discusses 5 great ways to practice spelling at home!
Written Expression
- Pre-phonemic Stage: This stage shows that the child is scribbling, drawing and mocking letters.
- Early Phonemic Stage: This is when children are using invented spelling, starting to notice environmental print and labeling pictures.
- Letter-name Stage: This is when children begin to read and write in a conventional way, meaning they begin to learn words and actually read text, and their writing becomes more readable to them- selves and others.
- Transitional Stage: This is when children display the ability to create meaningful sentences to communicate a message. They have mastered basic mechanics of writing in this stage.
- Conventional Writing Stage: At this stage, children spell most words correctly, with a reliance on phonics knowledge to spell longer words. Writing for different purposes becomes more important.
Word Families
Here is a great resource for word family activities you can do with your child! https://www.readingrockets.org/article/meet-word-families