Literacy at Home

Written by Lauren Andrick, Learning Solutions Clinician at Tampa Day School (landrick@tampadayschool.com)

There are several simple ways that you can support your child’s literacy at home. The single most important way to raise a reader is to have them read each day. Even just ten minutes a day can have a significant impact. Getting your child to read isn’t always easy but there are steps that can be taken to make it more of a routine. Remember reading doesn’t always need to look like your child reading silently and it also doesn’t need to be just reading a book. It can be reading street signs, movie subtitles or a menu, the directions for a game, or the back of a cereal box. Reading can also be listening to audiobooks or partner reading but reading should always be intentional and engaging.

Fostering a love of reading is one of the most powerful gifts educators and parents can give to children. It starts with making reading fun and relatable. For younger students, it might mean reading aloud with animated voices or providing books about their favorite animals or superheroes. For older students, connecting them with stories that resonate with their interests—whether it’s sports, fantasy or real-life adventures—can make all the difference (Concordia University)

Reading has a direct and positive correlation to academic success and a significant relationship with vocabulary development. As students gain an understanding of more words, comprehension will continue to blossom. 

CREATE A SAFE ZONE. Creating a reading environment where it is safe to make mistakes and allow an opportunity for growth is supportive of an advancing reader. Take time to identify your child’s strengths and use them to their advantage. Highlight their abilities by taking notice of what they are able to do well and provide compliments. For example, “I like the way you went back to try that word again when you realized the word you’re reading wasn’t making sense,” or “I find it great that you could carefully tell me about the setting in the story.” Notice if illustrating or acting may be their ticket to success when demonstrating understanding of what they are reading. Share your own personal difficulties with reading or an activity that took extra practice for you to become skilled. Your child can then understand the concept that progress occurs through practice, practice, and more practice.

OFFER CHOICE. Allowing a child to pick their own book and make this decision is what will sustain their desire to read. Do they need some help on what book to pick? They can read brief book summaries with genres outlined on this site K-12readinglist.com. Biblionasium.com is another great site. It is a social network for students and books where students can rate and review books and books can be shared by grade level/age level peers. Students can dig deep into finding books of interest and they can also keep track of their reading while parents and teachers can also be a part of this process.

Opportunities for reading should come in many formats. Children can utilize an audiobook to listen to a story. This is a great way to reduce the pressure of decoding, increase working memory and in turn help your child enjoy reading. Student comprehension will increase when a student gets to hear a book read to them and grade level content can be received more readily through an audiobook. This is especially helpful if your student can not read grade level content on their own. An audiobook provides a confidence boost for a student by allowing them to access grade level material and can support greater participation within the classroom. If your child does not remain interested in a selected book feel free to abandon it.

There are also many great sites to visit for audiobooks such as Audible.com, Harper Kids, KidsReads2Kids, LibriVox, Lit2Go. HarperKids is a great site for your child to find a list of books by age and or topic. KidsRead2Kids is a site where kids read to kids and an audiovisual of the book is provided. Lit2Go is a site where you can print PDFs of the stories so they can read them as they go.

MODEL EXPERT READING. Allowing your child to hear you read continues to be important even through middle school. When you model expert reading, you are cuing them to listen for pacing, intonation, prosody (rhythm), and fluency. Additionally, when you are reading, they are able to focus greater attention on content and word meaning and you can point out new words and figure out their meaning together. You can choose to read a book at a higher level than what your child may be reading and it will likely spark greater interest as the content will be more age appropriate. You can explain more challenging concepts as they present themselves. Modeling reading then lends itself nicely to partner reading: you read some then your child reads some. This could resemble a sentence, a paragraph, a page, or a chapter depending upon what your child is most comfortable doing. Your child can also read to a younger sibling as a confidence builder. Repeated readings is a fantastic strategy for increasing fluency over time, and also allows for deeper meaning to be gained as concepts become more clear.

ASK QUESTIONS. Parents should take opportunities to ask questions about what your child is reading. Asking questions supports students by actively engaging them with the reading experience and improves their comprehension. Below you will find a few questions sourced from Scholastic.com that will support your child in thinking outside of the box while reading:

1. If you could give the book another title, what would it be? 
2. Which characters would you like to meet in real life? 
3. What do you wish was different about the ending?
4. Would the book make a cool movie? Video game? TV show? 
5. What is one thing you could ask the author if you could talk to him or her?
6.  What do you think the author wants readers to remember most from this book?
7. Was there one big lesson you took away from this book? 

You may even want your child to participate in a strategy where they document some of their understanding on a sticky note. One way to achieve this is through a stop and jot or stop and draw. This is intended to be a quick way to show their knowledge of something about the text. Many students enjoy this activity to either write their knowledge or illustrate their knowledge. You may ask them to do something specific like one of the questions above or you could ask them to do something more general like share the conflict, your favorite part, a prediction, or a question that you have. See the images below for ideas.