On this video are practical powerful tips for reading with your child that can dramatically improve your child’s reading capabilities especially for elementary school children. Our son has language based learning issues and this approach has helped him tremendously.

 
As a parent you know that reading is extremely important. Studies show that the more children read, the better readers and writers they become.

Now as you know, our son has language based learning issues. Getting him to sit still to read a book when he was young was torture. No matter how much I put inflection in my voice and used sound effects, I could only get a couple of minutes out of him. What I have found, however, is that over time I am able to add more and more time to our reading time together.

What I want to do today is to give you some really practical tips for reading with your child that can powerfully improve your child’s reading capabilities especially for elementary school kids.

First find out from your school, the comfort reading level of your child. Each “grade” has multiple reading levels and your child is testing probably at least twice during the school year to determine his or her reading level.

Then what you need to do is to get a list of books at your child’s comfort reading level as well as a list of books at the next two reading levels above. You can get these lists either from your school, your school library, the public library and or online resources. For instance, Scholastic has an online book wizard that helps to list books by reading level.

Of course, there are many systematic approaches to reading levels and you need to understand which system your school uses. For instance some of the approaches for reading levels are Guided Reading, Basal Level, DRP (Degrees of Reading Power), Reading Recovery, DRA Level and Lexile Level. Our school uses the Basal rating system and our son’s comfort reading level is at PP2.

Then get a bunch of books at your child’s comfort reading level and then some books above your child’s comfort reading level. The books which are above your child’s comfort reading level (just one or two levels above) are the books that you read out loud to your child. Try to read out loud to your child each day for 15 to 20 minutes.

Then have your child read to you at their comfort level for 15 to 20 minutes. If you child is struggling to read, then these books may seem to be too young for them. They are not. It is extremely important for the child to do their practice reading at a comfort level that works for them where they experience success and not frustration.

Studies have actually shown that when children practice reading at their comfort level on a consistent basis, they can increase their reading capabilities dramatically and some children have even “jumped” reading levels simply by practicing at their comfort level.

That’s it. If you find that your child is getting extremely frustrated with some words or consistently misreads certain words, write them down on an index card and practice them a couple times of week. When your child starts reading the word correctly consistently, then they can be removed from the practice read.

I have found with our son that if I start with the parent read-aloud, it eases him into our reading time and then he is much better when it comes to his time to read.

In addition, our son does not have a good sense of time. To address that issue, I use a “Time Timer” which visually represents the amount of time we are going to read. I learned about this product from a speech therapist blogger whose blog can be found at ifonlyihadsuperpowers.blogspot.com. She has great product, book and website recommendations as well as general “food for thought.” So with the Time Timer, my son can visually check how much time we have left instead of constantly interrupting our reading time with the question, “how much time is left?”

The order in which you read with your child is not important, and the amount of time you start with to read is not important. Just do it and see the amazing progress that your child will achieve.

Good luck and happy reading!!! Until next time …

Karen