Helping Your Child Be A Reader

from: http://www.scholastic.com/parents/resources/article/reading-comprehension-and-decoding-strategies

Instead of simply telling him to “sound it out,” try these tricks:

• Say nothing. Give him a chance to figure it out.
• Say, “Look at the picture.”
• Say, “Let’s get the first sound.” 
• Say, “What would make sense?” Even if he gets the wrong word, you can say “Yes, it’s a kind of house, but the author chose a different word. Look at the first letter and see if you can get it now.” 
• Say, “Chunk it.” Are there smaller words in the bigger ones (e.g., ‘going’ has the word ‘go’ in it)?
• Say, “Let’s reread.” Before you tell your child the word, see if he can re-read the sentence and get it with a “running start.”
• Say, “Close your eyes. Now look again.” Have him close his eyes, open them, and see if his brain can just “get” the word as a sight word, without trying to sound it out.
• Say, “Say it like a word.” Decoding will only take you so far. If you know how to make the sounds come together like a word you know, it makes reading so much easier. It’s not about saying the sounds faster; it’s about saying them like a word. Country can be sounded out as “cow-n-try” or “count” “try.” But if they “say it like a word,” they are more likely to get to country. You can use a slinky to help them literally “see” what it looks like when they say stretched out sounds. Have them collapse the slinky as they “say it like a word.”
• Skip the word and come back when they have the context of the sentence (be sure they do). 
• Look at word families. If your child knows ‘at’, they will more easily be able to identify ‘hat.’ 
• Get the main word first, then add on prefixes or suffixes. You can use your finger to cover up parts of the word while your child gets the main word. 
• Tell them the word. You do not want to hinder the comprehension of a story by belaboring a single word. Instead, give your child the word and have her re-read the sentence so that the word sticks in her mind for the next time she encounters it!

To facilitate comprehension/thinking strategies, have your child:

• Ask a question about what he has already read (to themselves, or to you).
• Infer what is going on or might happen, based on what they already know and what they have read. 
• Make a connection:
  • Make a text-to-text connection where he relates this book to another he has read.
  • Make a text-to-world connection where he relates the book to an experience going on in our world (e.g., truffula trees being chopped down and our own struggles with deforestation).
  • Make a text-to-self connection where he relates the book to himseld or an experience he has had (e.g., remembering a time he was not listened to, even when he knew better than the other person).
• Visualize: Encourage your child to create a mental image or play the scene like a movie in her head
• Evaluate: Determine the importance of characters, events, or details. 
• Synthesize information means taking information you learn along the way and combining it with the information you know. 
• Other tips:
  • Make a prediction.
  • Take the character’s perspective or relate to the character’s feeling.
  • Read it like a sentence. If your child reads haltingly, have them re-read the same sentence to get the fluency (and confidence!) aspect of reading. It’s hard to comprehend disjointed sentences.