How to Help Your Child Succeed in Reading

Some children love books. The adventures, stories and learning about new places or people is enough to keep them reading. Others, cannot find pleasure in reading and as a result schoolwork is difficult and takes a lot of their time...which they resent. Read on to learn how to help your child succeed in reading.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• White paper craft sticks and stickers or small pictures to glue on the end of craft stick.
• Glue
• Markers, crayons and colored pencils
• Index cards with lines or without
• A marker to follow along with while reading if helpful to them some it is not
• Colored cellophane sheets to cover the white paper

1. Know the first method of reading that starts at pre-school age is called Picture Walking. This is done by the teacher showing pictures on each page and asking the child what they think the story is going to be about. The teacher then shows all the pictures without comments to see if the pictures are giving the children the general idea of the story and the child's interest is peaked. Big books with few words per page are best to use for this method. The second day of the week the same story is told and the children explain each page and read the sentences with the teacher. The third day the children read the sentence and the teacher just turns the pages.
2. Know that on the fourth day the teacher reads the sentence and leaves out a word to see if the children know what word is needed to complete the story. The last day of the week the same story is read and no help is given by the teacher as she just holds the book and follows the words with her marker or pointer to help keep their eyes on the right line.
3. Another method of instruction is called the REBUS story where children read the page by using pictures instead of words. For example, if the story is about the Little Red Hen this is how the sentence on the page would look. One day the little red hen; (picture of hen) went to the market (picture of market) this would be the first line. The second line would show the words One day Little Red Hen (no picture of hen) went to the market ( picture of market), The last sentence would like this; One day the Little Red Hen went to the market (no pictures needed to read it since they can look at the sentences above if they get confused about the word. Using the basic sight words and word wall at school and at home daily helps with the words that pictures can't describe...like the.
4. The last method is used for children who have a hard time reading due to lack of concentration or ability to follow along without an aid. The first method is to use a marker or the craft stick with the picture on the end to follow and point at the words as they read. Another method is to use one long rectangle cut from the paper and place it under the line. The newest method with which much success has come is to use a colored single sheet of cellophane (folders for term papers work great) over the white paper and read through the cellophane. This has been found to help ADD children read better as black on white is hard to concentrate on and color helps. Yellow, green or blue are recommended.

Tips & Warnings

• These are just some of the methods teachers are using and you can also help do at homework time.