It is crucial to have your children reading after they’ve learned to read. It is often seen that as soon as children have learned to read, they stop reading, they only read when there’s homework or they have to. As parents, it’s our responsibility to help them get better at reading and develop a reading habit for good.
Reading starts with understanding symbols, matching sounds with symbols, understanding words, reading words, and ends with being able to read paragraphs and stories, and finally being able to comprehend them as well. After being able to read and comprehend, the next step should be developing fluency in children.
You can help your children get fluent in reading by focusing on –
These three factors collectively make fluency. Now to develop on these factors, it is necessary that your children read as a habit, it is impossible to develop speed or accuracy without reading. A child who reads daily will understand words easily, thus speeding up and getting accurate automatically. Prosody is something that comes when children are read out aloud to. As parents, we should often read out to our children with expressions, and punctuation pauses, and ask them to do the same, in this way, they’ll slowly learn when to take pauses and how to tone their reading according to the content.
To further help your children become fluent readers you can –
It can benefit your children in many ways. It is a good activity for starters, try reading a book that is above your children’s reading level, has complex words, try being as fluent as possible, this motivates children to be as fluent as you. Moreover, seeing adults read, children feel that it is something they should also do quite often.
When you’ve done reading to your children, ask them to summarize what they have heard, or even if they’re reading themselves, ask them to summarize what they’ve read, this is a great exercise to develop comprehension skills.
Brainstorm over the content that they’ve read or you’ve read to them. This forces the children to think and analyze, thus making them better readers while at the same time, developing a rationale and helping them think out of the box.
We all know that word-reading is how children start to learn reading, but at no point in life can anyone be expert in all the words, thus find newer, slightly difficult words, and help your children in reading and understanding them.
While your children are reading, sit with them and ask them to read as fluently as possible, as if they were reading aloud to a live audience, don’t stop them from correcting in the middle, remember you’re practicing fluency at that time. When they’ve done reading, tell them where they made mistakes.
Of all the exercises and practices, encouragement is the best thing that you can do for your children. Even if they’re slow readers, make lots of mistakes, never pull them down and keep encouraging them. Correct them in a playful yet effective manner and never stop boosting them up.
Phonics helps a lot at the beginning of the reading journey for any child. Phonics not only helps the children connect sounds with symbols but also to understand spellings. Book a free trial class of Phonics today with Learn2read and witness how Phonics can benefit your children.
