Reading Success Lab
Phone 877-286-2801

  Reading Tips

How To Help Your Child Read More

An important component of improving general reading skills is practice at reading. Children who read get better at reading, and children who do not read make little progress. In many cases the key to getting a child involved in reading is to find out what he or she is interested in reading about. For example, we worked with a child who had little interest as a 3rd grade student in reading until he discovered the Goose Bumps mystery series and then he devoured every one he could find, and that led to an interest in reading other kinds of books.

Reading Tips

The philosophy is to provide them with whatever they are interested in (within reason of course) and let them hone their reading skills on that content. If they find that reading is not difficult that may lead to an interest in reading other kinds of content, and that in turn might lead to less difficulty in reading textbooks and other academic material.

Childhood Early Reading Strategy

Learning to read typically begins much earlier than many people think. It begins with children being read to and importantly with activities that emphasize that letters are a kind of “code” that captures the sounds of words.

When children are read to several important things happen. First, the children are learning that the squiggles on a page are a way of capturing language that can be comprehended. Second, activities that focus on letters and the sounds that letters make are teaching children what is called the “alphabetic principle.” The alphabetic principle is the notion that words can be coded into alphabetic characters and that through the process of reading the letters can then be decoded to get back to the words.

Another skill that children are picking up during early reading experience is the skill of “phonological awareness.” This is the idea that words can be broken up into constituent sounds. The realization that a word like “cat” can be decomposed into separable sounds is an important step towards the idea that we can use letters to capture the constituent sounds.

Most children learn to read just fine, but their success is not accidental. It is dependent on experience that starts before they enter school and continues through the early grades when they are in school. Early experience that leads to reading success starts with parents reading to their children, teaching them the letters of the alphabet, and working with them on letter-sound correspondences so that the children develop an appreciation of the fact that letters produce sounds that map onto the sounds we hear in speech.

The Importance Of Reading To Your Child

You can improve your child's reading by encouraging him or her to read. An important component of improving general reading skills is practice at reading. The more we read, the better we get at it, and the more we enjoy it. One technique that works well in getting a child involved in reading is shared reading with a parent. You start off by reading books to your child. You then move to, you read a page and your child reads a paragraph. Then it goes to, you read three paragraphs and you child reads one. You continue this process until your child is reading to you, rather than the other way around.
